The Cloud lord is the most powerful DS nation. The special abilities he has mean that played well, this nation can win the game. The Cloud Lord should use his starting army in the meat grinder of the Ithilian, and once gone, never recruit again. Instead he should create agents (and the odd emissary). New agents can be named at 40 skill rank, with +20 assassination bonus and possibly stealth, this character can eliminate enemy generals from the start. Ask the Drk Lt's for the Cloak of the Abyss (although the Drk Lts can use it themselves). With the Ring of Wind as well this agent can eliminate anyone! With no armies to support, you should also run a healthy surplus. This gold can be used to bail out the economies of the other DS nations. Steal Gold from the Gondors and pass it on. Send an agent or two into Mirkwood or Angmar and support your two isolated team-mates. Without doubt, this position is great fun to play. You can turn the side of a war, disband huge armies, wipe out all the characters in an enemy capital spreading panic and confusion. If anything, this position is too powerful! The Cloud Lord is a regular winner in previous games of ME1650, his nation bonus' have been debated endlessly with the majority of players claiming they are too powerful. If you get the chance to play the Cloud Lord you should enjoy it!
Strategy Guide by Brian Mason
Strategy Guide by Tom Walton
Cloud Lord Starting Information
Strategy & Tactics: The Cloud Lord
From Brian Mason
It is, once more, with a certain degree of trepidation that I begin this strategy and tactics column. First of all, my experience with character-based nations is minimal: the only good agents I've ever had have been killed by even better agents. Secondly, once more my submission is being followed by one which is going to be much better; Tom has played the Cloud Lord, and played him quite well (Tom's note: flattery will get you everywhere, Brian...need a new major town in game 97?). So, like last weeks offering, this one is intended to mostly consist of observations which might assist the novice at the position. How does the nation of the Cloud Lord compare to other nations? At the start of the game they rank as follows (Allegiance Comparison Tables, Tom Walton, "The Mouth," #3):
among all
among Dark Servants
Total Tax Base
tied for 18th
3rd
Resource Base
22nd
9th
Combat Strength
9th
2nd
Character points
14th
9th
Artefacts
12th
7th
The above are pretty misleading. Looking at these results, you might be led to believe that the strength of the Cloud lies in his military, not his characters. However, the truth is that his troops are far removed from the "front" and that is will take him time to get them there. Also, he does not have the recruiting centres that other, more military, nations of the Dark Servants have.
The Cloud Lord has pretty poor production. Expected production (Population Centre Development, Brian Mason, "The Mouth," #2) which has not been adjusted for climate for the nation of the Cloud Lord would be as follows:
le
br
st
mi
fo
ti
mo
go
production
705
391
171
15
2277
103
165
2773
The Cloud Lord has fair production of most commodities he might need. His major shortfall is in the area of timber. Three of his population centres (3626, 3428, 3528) start the game with no fortifications. Not so much for defensive purposes, but rather, to protect them from being degraded if loyalty drops, it is important that these population centres have towers built on them. Because of this shortfall in the area of timber production, and also because the climate modifiers are usually better, I would encourage the Cloud Lord player to create new camps in Hill & Rough hexes; first at 3529 and 3729, and then south of the Ephel Duath, between the 33 and 36 columns (the 33 column being the western limit to the Cloud Lord map and the 36 column being the western limit to the map of the Easterlings).
While you do not have a backup capital, your capital is rather secure. Attack from the north-west or north is virtually impossible as the attacker would need to go through Mordor to get to you. Attack from the north-east would first pass through the area of the Long Rider and Blind Sorcerer. Attack from the South is the only significant threat, and even then you would have many turns advance warning. In the table below is shown the number of turns it would take a cavalry army force marching to reach 3630. The first column list the possible starting location, the second column lists who the probable attacker could be, the third column lists who you could possibly get advance warning from (i.e. the starting location is on their map), while the fourth column lists the minimum number of moves from that location to your capital (3630) force marching a cavalry army.
starting
Probable
Advance
Turns to
from
attacker
warning?
reach you
3231
South Gondor
Fire King
2
Haradwaith
Quiet Avenger
3232
South Gondor
Quiet Avenger
2
Haradwaith
3436
Haradwaith
Quiet Avenger
3
Corsairs
4133
Easterlings
none
3
4022
Northmen
Long Rider
3
Eothraim
4225
Northmen
Blind Sorcerer
3
Eothraim
Easterlings
The bottom line here being that you can have at least two turns to recruit once you are aware of an army moving on you. Therefore, you should keep in your capital the materials to recruit 800 (if you do not improve your capital to a city) heavy cavalry. Why heavy cavalry? It has the potential to not only reach you, but once a target is identified you can then go after it.
The Cloud Lord is one of the strongest, most fun nations in the game to play. The win the game more often than any non-neutral (Winners & Losers in Middle Earth, Tom Walton, "The Mouth," #8). Without a doubt, your agents are your greatest advantage. You should develop a plan early on to make sure your agents are constantly improving their skills.
Of the first four character slots, three should be new agents while the fourth should be an emissary to place camps in the locations listed above. The army should be split, leaving 100 HC behind at the capital. This army should be increased in size whenever production is sufficient in the needed commodities (leather, bronze/steel, mounts). The remainder of the starting army of the Cloud Lord, 5300 strong, should be marched to and attack Northern Gondor. The Cloud Lord should never think of himself as a military power, rather, his starting army should go into the field to assist the military might of Mordor and once lost should not be replaced. The true strength of the Cloud Lord is in his agents. Both the four he starts with and the three he names. To march from 3630 through Mordor to Osgiliath will require one forced march and three regular marches (assuming the Fire King takes Minas Ithil, which he should).
Once the army is lost, the army commander should return to execute the capital only command orders or to improve the fortifications of the towns on the plains when the necessary timber is available.
Consider the following financial turn of events:
tax rate revenue maintenance reserve
Turn 1 40% 13773 25800 40000
actions - raise taxes to 60%, name a 40 agent and a 30 emissary.
Turn 2 60% 19273 26840 12973
actions - name a 40 agent.
Turn 3 60% 19273 27880 406
So, as you can see, given this conservative turn of events something has to change.
The Cloud Lord should lose most of his troops on turn five, putting him in good financial shape. Also, his gold production may be better. Even so, he will be in poor financial shape for camp placement and tower building unless he gets more gold.
Fortunately, this goes hand in hand with improving his agents. From turn one he should, after naming a 40 agent, begin moving his agents out where they can begin stealing gold. If not from the neutral wealthy Harad, then from the Gondors, preferably South Gondor as Northern Gondor will be, despite their troop losses, in poor financial shape due to the losses of population centres in Ithilien and Rhovanion. There are other attractive nations to go after early on, but only the Gondors are likely to have the gold production that you will need to keep your own economy going.
The agent improving should go something like this, guard until the agent rank reaches 40-50, then move to a hostile population centre, steal gold until the agent rank reaches 50-60 then move to where poorer enemy characters are, kidnap and assassinate until the agent rank gets above 80, and then go after the primary commanders.
After your army is lost, consider an adventure into Eraidor to take agent actions against Arthedain and Cardolan. This will inspire fear in these nations for several turns and will help keep them off guard, and possibly waste orders. Fear is a very important weapon. Your adversaries will, after being the victim of agent attacks, (or should be) constantly be on the lookout for your agents. Having their own agents ScoChar rather than improving their ranks by guarding.
Send your enemies threatening messages. Tell them you are coming and don't show up. Tell them you are coming and do show up, but make sure you win. Tell them you're stealing gold. Boast. To truly use fear as a weapon you must establish the game persona of the invincible agent.
Strategy & Tactics: The Cloud Lord
From Tom Walton
This is the first time I've gone into detail on a character-oriented nation. I tend to favour neutrals, who in most cases have lousy characters; and of the Dark Servants, I generally opt for those with a strong military presence. Characters to me are unique, but more commonly adjuncts to the primary concern - the conquest of the enemy via brute force.
I say this as a cautionary note to my suggestions for the Cloud Lord nation. While my own experience as the Cloud Lord in game 115 has turned out remarkably well, I've done much worse as the Dragon Lord in 117, where I can't seem to get the military and character aspects of that nation to mesh in a coherent fashion. So, while I can say in all honesty that I'm fairly decent with strategy and armies, I can't make the same remarks with respect to those nations for which characters, and not armies, determine victory. In light of this, my suggestions might not be particularly good, and may only have worked for me out of sheer luck. Buyer beware.
The following is a run-down of the exact strategy I used in game 115, and which has put me into the number #1 slot for the Dark Servants (and fairly high among the Free and Neutrals as well). Since the strategy never failed at any point, I can't think of anything better to recommend. I would, of course, love to hear an alternate point of view from someone who primarily players character nations and not military nations.
Onward:The Cloud Lord is arguably the strongest Dark Servant nation in Middle-Earth. This may sound strange: the position has a so-so army, a poor character set, and only a few mediocre artefacts. This is off-set by a strong economy, but even here the Cloud Lord doesn't compare to the Witch-King or to the stronger Free Peoples and Neutrals. What set of factors, then, is responsible for making the Cloud Lord the top Dark Servant to take a winning position in all games of Middle-Earth?
In playing the Cloud Lord, I identified a few minor strengths which turned out to be major assets right off the bat:
economic power. Though the Cloud Lord is a minor economic entity in comparison to many nations, he ranks third among all Dark Servant nations. Once the Cloud Lord loses his army to the Free Peoples, he can generate a nice surplus of gold each and every turn, something very few positions in Mordor can do even if they too lose their forces (although this is in part due to the fact that most of the Cloud Lord's characters suck).
economic bonus. Being the Cloud Lord, acquiring the 'excess' gold of other nations is fairly easy to do. Indeed, judicious agent creation and use will give the Cloud Lord more gold than he knows what to do with. In 115, this allowed me to ship over 100,000 gold to allies in the space of four turns, without which one of these might have gone bankrupt. In any event, this gold not only will strengthen the Cloud Lord, it'll also help his allies keep up the good fight against the enemy.
isolation. Unless Mordor has some real boobs running the show, the Cloud Lord is situated such that he doesn't have to worry about his pop centres coming under attack. This means that once his army is disposed of, he doesn't have to raise significant forces for home defence. And, as Brian pointed out, imminent invasion will still give the Cloud Lord at least two turns of warning prior to the attack, allowing him to raise forces to counter the threat as it approaches.
agents. Pretty obvious, eh? Even with the changes to the orders made by GSI, Cloud Lord agents are still very effective even when first created. Being able to make 40-pointers capable of stealing gold, possibly with a high stealth bonus, allows the Cloud Lord to get them into action right away without first training them up.
Though assassinations and kidnappings may be out of the Cloud Lord's league during the opening of the game, gold theft and sabotage are not.
The opening turns tend to be critical for Dark Servants; a mistake can result in disaster for the entire team. This is what I suggest for the Cloud Lord:
retire Ar-Gular immediately. He's a worthless emissary/mage who won't be effective in any way for at least the next 15 turns. Get rid of him and replace him with a brand-new 40-point agent.
name 3 more agents asap. This will give you four new agents within the first couple of turns, increasing your stable of agents to 8.
use the last character slot to name a pure emissary.
Once you have your eight agents, split them into three groups.
Have two agents hit up one nation for gold (your worst agents are good choices), with two others doing the same to another nation (note: do NOT do this with 30-point agents. Train up the two low agents you start with to 40+ before sending them out to wreak havoc). This guards against a single target running out of gold and leaving you in the lurch. Take the remaining four agents and create a company under Ji Indur. This company will steal gold, sabotage fortifications, and kidnap minor or unprotected characters.
Many people think that making Ji Indur the company commander is a waste. Note, however, that he's the best agent available at start, with a potential 90 skill rank for kidnappings/assassinations (40 skill + 30 stealth + 20 bonus). On the other hand, he's fairly lousy at his other skills, and will take turns of training to get up to decent skill scores (while crawling up the track in agent skill by doing 'Guard' orders). From my point of view, it was a waste not to have him on the offence right away, and so I choose to make him the company leader rather than blow 10,000 gold and a character slot on another commander-agent.
the Cloud Lord army is a major drain on the economy, and it's difficult to run a military campaign while leaving open enough character slots to create an extensive agent network. I'd suggest taking that army to the Ithil Pass immediately in support of the Fire King and neighbours against Gondor. Attack the enemy as quickly as possible and try to lose the army early. Your forces at Ithil can be the determining factor in whether or not Mordor is bottled up by the Free or whether it breaks out into the Ithilien and Rhovanion.
begin recruiting a small force of heavy cav at the capitol once the main army is gone. This will act as the home defence force for the Cloud Lord, and an emergency response team in case the Free Peoples break through the Pass or Morannon, or come in through the East. Heavy cav are the only troops capable of reacting fast enough to an invasion, so a smaller force of cav is more effective than a larger force of heavy infantry.
After your agents are on the offence, you should have gold coming out of your ears. Don't hoard it; this will only hurt your allies, and indirectly, yourself. Send excess gold to those which need it the most (probably the Witch-king and Dragon Lord). The stronger your allies are, the less likely it is that the Free Peoples will come looking to bash down the gates to your capitol. Since these allies will be bearing the brunt of the military campaign (in effect fighting for you), it only makes sense that they have the funds required to do a good job of it.
As for stealing gold, the best choice for this is the Gondors.
The Eothraim and Northmen have gold at the start, but they tend to lose their treasuries quickly. Aside from which, they also happen to be favourite targets of other Dark Servants. The Gondors, on the other hand, are usually running a surplus (all those troops dying in the Ithilien), so they often have cash in the vaults.
There's also the possibility of stealing from the rich southern neutrals, but I'd avoid this if I were you. Having played southern neutrals 5 times (and getting hit by the Dark Servants 4 of those 5 times), I can tell you that more often than not the name of the offending agent showed up on my pop centre report. Even if the character was new, a simple spell would reveal who that character belonged to, identifying the fool who thought he was being so clever. I've also doubled enemy agents to find out which nation they served, as well as captured them and interrogated them. In all, if you hit the neutrals be prepared to incur their wrath and possibility a change of allegiance to the enemy side.
The use of the agent company under Ji Indur is probably your most critical decision. I'd advocate hitting nations with poor characters (such as the Eothraim or Northmen), leaving the Gondors alone for the opening game. While this was my plan in game 115, the refusal of the Gondors to guard their characters, and the first-turn drop of the Fire King, forced me to concentrate my agent power and start butchering strong enemy leaders. This wouldn't have been possible against an experienced set of players, but I lucked out in 115 (damn good thing, too, because three Dark Servants dropped by turn 2).
Many players spread out their agents among a host of nations. I think this is a waste. Any Free nation can take one or two agent attacks a turn and shrug them off as annoying; no Free nation can hold up long against the attentions of the entire Cloud Lord agent set. I've used massed attacks with good results against the Gondors, kidnapping a host of characters, disbanding armies, and sacking treasuries. It has, so far, allowed my nation to hold the Ithilien against all-comers, even with the Fire King out and no one else inclined to come help.
An example: I recently sent both my company of four agents under Ji Indur and four other gold-theft agents to Minas Anor. All identified characters present were kidnapped or killed, and the treasury was gutted. In the space of one turn, Gondor's entire war effort was crippled. Even should my agents leave, what will the paranoia inspired by a possible return do to his plans?
A common tactic is to send agents to Eriador to help out the Witch-King. This can be a good move, as neither Cardolan nor Arthedain are set up to repel enemy agents. However, this also puts most of the Cloud Lord's agent power far from Mordor - too far to deal with a sudden thrust by the Free against the Dark Servants, or with the declaration of a southern neutral for Good. I'd caution against sending your agents so far away until both the Ithilien and southern Rhovanion are secured militarily by your allies.
This last suggestion will probably generate some controversy.
Many players advocate stacking artefacts to create super-agents, those capable of blowing through guards and killing the best of characters. I do not. Stacking the artefacts means you have one really good agent (or two or three) - but that's it. Instead, I believe that artefacts should be spread out to create a half dozen or more decent agents which can sabotage pesky fortifications or eliminate average-rank characters. This allows you to make many more disabling attacks against the enemy each turn, which I think will prove much more a hindrance than losing a single nice character every turn. It's something to crow about when you off Tarondor or Elrond, but really, what the hell difference is it going to make if 10,000 Free troops are trying to barrel through the Pass?In doing this, agents aren't used to kill the best characters among the enemy, but those which are most critical to the war effort. Those left in the capitol, for example, are generally not very skilled; yet they're trusted with buys, sells, transport orders, and raising troops. Kill these guys and the plans of the enemy go to hell in a handbasket. Kill his army leader, and the subcommander takes over and keeps on trucking (as friendly Ice King opponent in game 97 just found out). Other examples: off the enemy emissaries and put a halt to his camp creation/upgrade efforts; nail one of his mages so he can't 'Scry' or 'Locate' anymore, depriving him of needed information; make a counterattack against his guarding agents, leaving better characters exposed to kidnaps on the following turns; steal all of his artefacts and drop the 'good' ones in the Sea of Nurn. How nice is Tarondor if he doesn't have all those neat command items anymore, eh? Hardly worth the effort of assassination!
The Cloud Lord is vulnerable in a couple of areas:
The old agent rules are OUT! To play the Cloud Lord effectively, you now have to work up to these wondrous feats, avoiding the 'targets of glory' and working on more mundane tasks.
This fact is one that a few Dark Servant regulars have difficulty in accepting, and so they go from being good players to poor ones.
Agents are generally challenge-bait. The main reason I formed a company was so that my agents could refuse and do an action while the company commander moved them (Ji Indur refuses and moves). Any good commander can kill the best of agents, especially if he's toting around a glowing sword. Betting on the enemy not seeing you, or not challenging you, is dangerous.
Avoid enemy emissaries. These guys can double your agents PRIOR to agent actions, rendering your characters ineffective. And they remain ineffective until you conduct counter-intelligence (while giving away loads of information to the enemy). I've used this tactic on a number of occasions against enemy agents, with the enemy being none the wiser (I've yet to have someone 'un-double' one of my targets).
The Cloud Lord is lousy at scouting. If you scout with only one agent when entering a new area, you'll likely miss a few characters no matter how good your agent is. To counter this, have two agents move in and scout at the same time. It's rare for them to both miss the same character, so the scouting reports often overlap and catch characters you'd otherwise not see. This is true even if the agents aren't very good (two 50-point scouts are better than one 80-point scout).