You sort of went over this point, but Markata are actually extremely good at tying up expensive enemies. 14 Defense Skill and Size 1 means they can survive a shockingly long time against even elite cavalry (even though they're not really gonna *accomplish* much other than staying alive). They're an extremely effective way of bogging down expensive and powerful units for the entire duration of the fight (Especially useful if you're relying on something like Curse of Stones to wear down the enemy army).

Atavi Chieftains are also almost literally scouts - you can recruit them in any forest, even without a fort.

I think you might have overlooked what IMO is one of the biggest hidden strengths of the Kailasa monkey army, which is the Bandar Warrior and its Sticks and Stones attack. It sounds dumb but it hits as hard as a human-thrown javelin and they can throw two per round, at range 15, for THIRTEEN rounds longer than other kinds of light infantry, people would be moaning about it being OP if it was in another nation's lineup. I'd compare it to if you had a recruitable 8g human peltast with 15 javelins but it's even better than that in several ways because it's like two of those stapled together, with a 21 damage mace attack. I feel like most people don't give the naked gorilla a second look but it should be one of your army's core units. Between that and the Bandar longbow archers you can continuously fling a ton of high-damage ranged attacks into the general vicinity of an enemy front line that can be stopped in its tracks by Markatas/Swarms/Sleep Clouds/Stellar Cascades/half the other stuff in your toolkit so you can win without ever getting into a full-on melee battle, which is good because it's pretty much the only way your monkeys can win. Anyway it's important to be able to use Kailasa's monkey troops effectively by themselves so you can rely a bit less on your sacreds - your monkeys are expendable, especially your forest-recruitable monkeys, but your sacreds are much less so, you can't afford to casually lose a significant number of them to expansion attrition if you want to accumulate a huge army of them for life-and-death battles in the midgame.

From the 2 games that i have played with this nation i learned the importance of a magic weapons bless vs nations that can summon fire elementals. Ethereal plus fire shield made my sacreds pretty much kill themselves with that range 0 kick attack while fishing for that 25% chance to get through the ethereal to hit the bloody elemental.

After watching this video, kailasa has gone from a nation I paid little attention to, to one which I'm quite interested in!! Thanks for all the info and stuff!

I think the lightning bolt weapon has to be 10 pearls. If they made it 5, people would hammer it down to 3 (with native access to dwarven hammers) and spam them on to scouts/indy commanders from random provinces. Casting magic with an item is ~5 fatigue, so 10 guys with these with just natural fatigue recovery could fling > 100 lightning bolts per fight before fatiguing out, for 30 pearls (when using hammer). At base of 10 pearls it goes from oppressive to rarely used/niche. Though it's a way to get lightning resistance onto something, if you stack it with acorn necklace you can get 25 shock res from items, so that's something in a pinch. I wish you could script the buffalo retinue from headdress, would totally point buff a berserking tramper with luck/ethereal. As it stands not an impressive item outside assassinations, though it's pretty good in that role for its cost.

Loved the guide! You do some of my favorite Dominions 5 content on the web!

Also, the Rudra's description right at the end mentions that, as entities of pure destruction and vengeance they have no patience for or interest in reading books or making items, which is why they're so bad at research and forging.

Reincarnation can be useful with mass batteries of magic duelers because you’ll get about half of them back that fail. Also good on anti raiders, e..g, yogi point buffers that travel with small groups of elephants or apsara (the yogis are move 16, another reason they are my favorite mage in the game). They’re not “killing things” in this case because they’re point buffing. Generally agree though. It’s not very meaningful beyond flavor. I didn’t know the details of reincarnation to that level, thanks.

lol. Did KZfaq not like your original screenshot XD Great to see a video on this civilization

Expanding with Kailasa without awake pretender or protection blesses is absolutely doable but it takes a lot of practice, as you say. I like to use the sacreds as flankers withe archer makarta to pin indie squads. You don’t even need to bless the sacreds when you get it down, which is great. You reserve your bless for dealing with what players will oppose you with. The real challenge is dealing with indies that have more than one squad.

Archer makarta stay in place making them much easier to buff esp point buffs like body ethereal/luck, making them MUCH better blockers. That’s why you get them over the sticks and stones variety.

In case you wondered, you cant slap a Monolith to size 1

47:32 Bless you

You missed a spell. Summon Devala may look like Summon Devata but they are different.

Bruh nice thumbnail bro

KemoFure art? Nice.

Markata won't hit anything in the head with a club. They are size 1 and cannot reach the head of a human sized enemy in melee.

Do you have a link to wherever you got that information about reincarnation from, I was under the impression we didn't really know how it works.

Only the bosses get hats in kailasa