Atlanteans

## **Historical brief**

Atlantis is a fictional island mentioned in Plato's works. In the story, Atlantis is described as a naval empire that ruled all Western parts of the known world, making it the literary counter-image of the Achaemenid Empire. After an ill-fated attempt to conquer "Ancient Athens," Atlantis falls out of favor with the deities and submerges into the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the historically proposed locations are in or near the Mediterranean Sea: islands such as Sardinia, Crete, Santorini (Thera), Sicily, Cyprus, and Malta; land-based cities or states such as Troy, Tartessos, and Tantalis (in the province of Manisa, Turkey), Israel-Sinai or Canaan, and northwestern Africa, including the Richat Structure in Mauritania.

## Rulebook entry

As the Atlanteans, you begin as an empire, which means you can use the powerful cards from the start of the game. However, it also means you have to ensure a constant supply of material, population and progress to develop further. Atlantis is under the constant threat of floods, and you’ll need to prioritise finding new or risk your nation sinking entirely. But with the rising waters come rewards, which if used wisely will see your nation become true myths and legends.

## Civilization spotlight

To account for the fact that they are a people of legend from the mythical “Dawn of Time”, the Atlanteans differ from all other civilisations in Imperium in two significant ways. First, they have no history pile, but instead have a sunken pile – their entire civilisation is at risk being flooded! While the sunken pile functions much like another civilisation’s history pile, cards that the Atlantean player would place into their history are instead simply discarded. This means that powerful cards that can usually only be played once per game before being consigned to history, such as the Acclaimed fame card, can be used multiple times to great effect.

Secondly, the ancient Atlanteans start as an empire. This gives you a lot of control over your strategy, as you choose which cards you develop (and when), rather than having to rely on the random order of your nation deck. However, that means that every deck cycle, you will need to find the materials, population, and progress needed to develop the cards you want, or miss out on the opportunity to add these valuable cards to your deck.

The other important advantage of starting as an empire is you can use the powerful cultured cards that appear in the market from the very start of the game. Beware, however, that some nations get a bonus to their attacks on empires. This is especially true if you combine your Legends game with Imperium: Classics, where some of the more aggressive civilisations lay in wait, such as the Celts with their Cattle Raid, covered in an earlier blog post.

Before playing Atlantis, we recommend (even more than usual) that you look through your deck. You will notice sinking is a major aspect of these cards. You have three Flood cards, which serve as your main way of acquiring key cards from the market, but if you use them to sink too many of your starting regions, your Prosperity card won’t be able produce the resources you need in the early game. Another way of gaining market cards is to sink your Atlantean Fleet, but you may find it more useful to use it to attack, and instead sink other cards to keep your deck optimised for rapid cycling.

The other utility card you are missing is Glory, which most civilisations rely on to earn fame. As the Atlanteans, you’ll instead need to develop your Myths and Legends, which will let you earn fame at the cost of sinking a region in play. As you can see, between Floods and Myths and Legends, you’ll definitely need more regions! Fortunately regions, such as Themiscyra, are available to develop should the market run dry of, well, dry land.

All your development cards are useful, so it’s probably a good idea to have a priority list and work to have sufficient resources to develop them in the order you want. If you adopt this approach, a strong early option is Vast Wealth, as it provides a discount on your future developments – but only if you are sure you’ll have enough to keep going for a “longer burn” rather than a quick splash before you disappear beneath the waves.

Atlantis’ tools are incredibly powerful, but to soar above your opponents and claim victory, you’ll need to look beyond your own developments to the rest of the world.

## Strategy

### Early to mid game

Regions will be your main bottleneck as Atlanteans (especially if you go for fame cards), so try to use your starting Floods to acquire at least 2 new regions. Watch out that contrarily to other nations, any card you garrison under a region is usually gone for good. Unless you're going for a fame rush strategy, you'll need a bunch of resources since you will be developing early and often, so make sure to make good use of your Prosperity. Atlantean fleet is a great card but a bit awkward in the Atlanteans' deck as you often don't want to sink extra cards. Try to play it when your discard is empty, or sink it to grab a key card from the market.

### Mid to late game

If you're going for a fame rush strategy, develop Myths and legends followed by Spread of Atlantis. Otherwise, Vast wealth is a good first development that will help you in future developments while keeping your options open. I usually follow it up with Development to accelerate the developments even more.

### Best common cards

You should make the most of your advantage to be able to play empire-only cards early on. They are usually fairly powerful effects and you won't have too much competition for them. I like to put progress tokens on them early on to sweeten the deal even more and prevent my opponents from exiling them (they can ofc steal them from you but they would be clogging up their deck to do so). Other than that, cards generating resources (particularily City and Metropolis early on) are great too as you'll need a good amount of resources for your developments. Astronomy is decent early as you'll be acquiring a fair amount of regions throughout the game. Speaking of regions, keep in mind that if you get to develop Advanced culture, any region you pick up is getting you an extra 1.5 to 2 VP (depending on your nation side), which can add up in the end.

## References

1. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis
2. ↑ https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2650633/imperium-civilisation-spotlight-atlanteans
3. ↑ https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2695493/advanced-strategic-tips-each-nation