Tolkien
From FaitH
Contents |
Overview
Together with Omega and Rift-Rift, Tolkien is a church with lots of raw attack power. It generates a lot of bloodshed when attacking, but it's shadow army is notoriously weak. Omega is superior to Tolkien in terms of overall effectiveness, but this church is still enjoyable. As with it's sibling churches, hitting a weak shadow army generates large kill ratios and excellent amounts of chaos points. Players need to be fairly active to properly play this church.
Units
Generals
Start Up
Generally, Tolkiens pick a defensive map so that they can tower and defend themselves more easily.
Every Tolkien starts as the Genesis church. It's only through fissioning that you pick up the Tolkien units. You get red dwarves and lorei at level 15, and doomed imps at level 16. It's a good idea to wait till level 16 to fission.
Once you have a Tolkien army, it's time to hit targets. PS inefficient targets or shadow armies are great choices. The goal is to hit hard for high spoils. You'll lose a lot of troops in the process so there's some work in rebuilding your forces after each assault. The Tolkien army generates the best benefit for you when it's attacking someone.
Be aware that you are a great target as well once people have figured you out. ToK that warns you of attacks (namely cave of dreams or magic towers) is extremely useful.
Army Configurations
Army setup for Tolkien is probably the easiest in the game. The only balance issues are between attack and defense. Red dwarves provide a lot of attack, heal, and trample while lorei provide defense and somewhat better numbers. You need barely enough explorers to cover losses (especially when your shadow army gets hit at home). Similarly, you need enough doomed imps to negate the defensive structures. They otherwise provide nothing for your army.
The ratio of dwarves to lorei depends in large part on your target. If it is weak, low attack, or overly depends on high heal/trample (a shadow army tolkien has all three), then higher dwarves is effective. More lorei helps blunt high attack and provides better boosts to troop count than dwarves do. Generally, you don't want to have less than 1 dwarf per lorei nor more than 1.5 dwarves per lorei. Special cases do exist. If you're hitting weak genesis-genesis targets, for example, then you can run very high dwarf levels (but make sure you always have lorei and explorers on the generals with red dwarves for maximum wounding and carnage).
An unusual configuration can be used for a strictly defensive player (which normally defeats the purpose of Tolkien). Use a very small number of lorei, and replace the rest with daughters of shadow. The PS efficiency of daughters of shadow is significantly better than lorei. Make sure every general with a special ability gets some troops (even a small number of lorei is enough). Run roughly equal numbers of red dwarves and DoS+lorei. It'll still get beat by a proper Good Celeste, but it's extremely tough and regenerates quickly (aside from the token lorei, every unit recruits in 6 days or less).
