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Re: Pangaea advice
I don't have much experience / luck with blood, but it does seem that a blood fountain would be a bad idea, if you mean to have it blood hunting in the capitol. You really don't want to muck up your capitol, with any nation. If you take it simply to cast high-blood spells, that's different, but out of my expertise.
Unrest : The free maenads for default Pangaea are pretty decent in my opinion - just make sure to recruit enough Pans to generate lots. One very nice thing is that they generate even while you're away from your fortresses, meaning that you can get reinforcements as you go along. High Production : depends on your plans. I've played most Carrion Woods, where I try to get the bloody cowardly satyrs killed off so I don't have to pay upkeep. This gives me a very low impression of the satyrs, because of their atrocious morale. Hoplites and the minotaurs are better, but ... Better in my opinion to go high unrest (3), 0 (or max 1) Sloth, just so you can build -some- of the heavier units. That or take a high admin fortress (30+) to compensate somewhat. Again - most of my experience though is Carrion Woods, or trying more for summoned armies (vine men / ogres, kitharonic lions, etc) because of my dim view of Pangaea's home brewed troops. Thus, I also don't have much experience with blessings for them. Hope this helped a bit. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif |
Re: Pangaea advice
You should rely on the centaur warriors...they are damn good. Especially buffed with strength of giants, because their hoof attack is strength-based, so it counts double. Legions of steel is also nice for survival. They have just low enough protection for it to be annoying.
I had a guy use a force like that on me, and they absolutely MAULED a horde of C'tis elite warriors. Those centaur warriors had some experience, but the point is that with recuperation and high speed you actually have a good chance of getting and keeping experienced centaurs. As for turmoil, No. You lose a lot of income that way, and it only means that pans in your territory will get more maenads. You want to be on the offensive, and maenads aren't that good anyway. Beyond that I don't know enough about pangaea to answer. |
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Also, this might be a viable strat for the carrion woods theme since it will kill economy anyway. But the deafault theme should not neglect the economy aspect. Quote:
Thanks for the correction. I wonder why I has such a high unrest in my provinces then?- with no blood hunting and tax rate of 100 at the begining of the game?? [ May 31, 2004, 15:43: Message edited by: izaqyos ] |
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I try to take a look at the nation overview each turn, with units off, just to check the unrest & taxes in each one. When unrest starts getting to 20, I start thinking about dropping the taxes. If unrest is over 30, I drop taxes to 0 until unrest is 0 again. And yes, in a couple of SP games with standard Pangaea I've had some success with the high Turmoil, 450 GP fortifications. Using Pans and the Maenads in conjunction with regular troops worked well enough that I could have 2 armies taking provinces from very early in the game. One of course was my Carrion Dragon; the other would have a dryad, a Pan, and a centaur or two commanding satyrs and centaurs. Generally I'd attack a province, search it the next turn, and have enough Maenads again to attack the next province. Then, the 30 admin fort would be built, not so much on high resource provinces, but on high gold provinces (especially with high resource neighbors). If a province generated 50 GP a turn, the fortress pays itself off in 30 turns. Faster than that, imo, because it keeps me from losing the base 50 for a couple of turns to a random event invasion. I'm not saying this is an ideal way to play stock Pangaea, but my test SP games (going to turn 30 or 40) against difficult opponents tended to have me in the leading position on most graphs. |
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How about a bless strategy? I tried the carrion dragon with 9 picks of nature and death. I tested my blessed centaurs in battle and they were awesome. But maybe the medusa can give a better bless with nature and earth or maybe I can go for a rainbow mage for both site search and lesser bless effects of all paths. Did anyone try going for bless pretender? |
Re: Pangaea advice
Lord of Fertility with Nature 10 gives White Centaurs Berserker +7 (or 6 if you go with only Nature 9), which is pretty nice, and it doesn't cost a fortune either.
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Anyway they are home province so I don't know if I would base my strategy around them. |
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Anyway they are home province so I don't know if I would base my strategy around them. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">That was one of my issues with the Black Centaurs, since the only real bless strategies I've had with Pan are with CW. Capitol only, on a large map it's tough to get them where they're needed (unless / until you get to the "Walking hand in hand through the forests" spell). Tough and effective, but not something I could see building a strategy around, not like Battle Vestals, Flagellants, Jotuns, etc. |
Re: Pangaea advice
In the early game Pangaea has a very good unit - centaur warrior and the expansion phase will mostly rely on centaur warriors and pretender. The major Pangaea weakness is poor research and lack of offensive magic. To compensate for that I would suggest magic+2 which will make a passable researcher from dryad (5p for 110 gold and you're getting level-3 priests with it). Pans are very expensive and they will take most of your income, so it's better to rely on summons later. I usually mix lamias for survivability, Vine Ogres for a meat shield and various (weak and strong) undead. This is in line with poor research, because you only need conjuration and construction to setup good summon production. Ivy Kings and Lamia Queens are optimal for nature chain-summons. Lamia Queens will also give you an access to death magic and astral magic. Later on you can summon few demiliches to do your further undead summoning.
I wouldn't rely on maenads, because in MP most will be playing order, and you would like to have order in your empire too, because of your costly mages. Hoplites are decent troops, but they're slow and their time of usability is quite short. Plus they cost upkeep. Same applies to armored minotaurs. So I would sacrifice productivity and take sloth-3. So the scales come to Order+3/Prod-3/Luck-2/Magic+2. To further increase income and somewhat compensate for poor productivity I'd take castle. This leaves plenty of points to build a pretender. There're 2 goals here: cover missing magic paths and create good SC to help early expansion. The good choice here is infamous vampire queen. Something like fire-2,air-3,water-2,earth-1,death-3,blood-3. This will give you good indy conquerer with alteration-3, "almost" rainbow mage for site searching, plus an item forger. I wasn't taking infamous VQ myself, trying to find some other good pretender, but whatever I've tried, VQ would be better. Even if you don't want to take VQ, pretender should probably be build along those lines. |
Pangaea advice
Hi,
I am soon about to start a PBEM game as Pangaea. I played a bit with that nation and tried several approaches. None of which was too successful. I have a few specific questions and I would appreciate any further tips on playing Pangaea. 1. Should I take high turmoil? High turmoil attracts maenads but lowers taxes increase unrest and forces me to patrol heavily. 2. Should I take high production? Some heavy resource units - satyr hoplite and the armored mino. Perhaps I can do with high sloth and produce low resource units and the sacred white centaurs? 3. Should I take high luck? Should I build for cross-breed spell? 4. I've tested a blood fountain pretender with high turmoil. It crippled my economy. Is there a sound strategy for building blood economy? 5. Should I use a bless effect pretender? Which are the most suitable? [ May 31, 2004, 13:14: Message edited by: izaqyos ] |
Re: Pangaea advice
From my (limited) experience:
If you take strong turmoil (3), you'll be getting more maenads by the midgame than you can spend or effectively ship to the front with just 5-6 pans in the capitol. The question is wheter you'll survive until then, but if you do, you'll have to recruit a hierophant every turn just to get them out of there, and have an ever-flowing stream of reinforcements. Centaurs and regular minotaurs can make a short work of any regular army, but it's essential that you have something to soak up the arrows and inital shock, and maenads are good for this since they are free, abundant and don't rout easily regardless of high casualties. Another alternative would be revelers, which are cheap and still won't rout easily, and which you'll be able to afford quite a lot if you take order - forget about regular satyrs if you don't want to pick them up in the neighbouring provinces after each battle. I have had good results with using fire 9 blessing with white centaurs, due to their speed and overall high stats. This means that they will be able to reach the back lines quickly and make a short work of anything that's there. Even if they do get hit, which is not too likely (high def, prot, mr for a recruitable unit, particulary of such speed), they'll go berserk and get the job done. Since I almost exclusively played regular Pangaea with high turmoil, the armored troops (cataphracts, hoplites, war minos) didn't fit in well, so I have nothing too good to say about them. If you want to play with them, however, my suggestion would be to take New Era instead of the default anyway. You can also try sneaky tactics with your whole armies, but maenads that make the bulk of my armies cannot sneak, so I generally didn't employ sneaking much. If you go with reveler option, however, this is more viable, as you'll have armies composed of recruited stealthy units for raiding - even serious raiding if you manage to sneak in with centaurs. Another cool thing with Pangaea are the hierophants. They are cheap, able commanders and priests to boot, have good precision, and if you hit a pan with random in air or indie mages with air, give them longbows of accuracy for some added fun. Blood and crossbreeding are useful at the beginning, since you'll probably take luck if you took turmoil (and this is not nearly as bad as it used to be), but blood hunting is expensive for Pangaea, the cost of Pandemoniacs being a bit prohibitive. And, as a Last note, be weary of the fire-using nations, since the 6th spell your pans and dryads are going to cast will alomst invariably be protection or mass protection. Minotaurs make lovely torches after that. Cheers, [ June 01, 2004, 01:24: Message edited by: HJ ] |
Re: Pangaea advice
I wouldn't go for a bless strategy with Pangaea, since they only have the one sacred combat unit. But if I did go with a bless strategy, I definitely wouldn't use the nature blessing that some have suggested, since it will make your Dryads, Pans, an Hierophants into berserkers rather than the spell casters you mostly want them to be. And your sacred centaurs already have basic berserking anyway.
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Pans I'd be concerned about losing to berserk - but unless I'm mistaken, the only ones you have to worry about are the Pan you make your prophet, and Carrion Lord/Lady/Centaur summonables when playing Carrion Woods. Regular Pans aren't sacred, albeit with CW I don't take nature above 3 because with it, almost all your commanders could go berserk. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif (Again, Carrion Centaurs you'd probably want going berserk, but not Lords and Lazies.) [ June 01, 2004, 03:44: Message edited by: Cainehill ] |
Re: Pangaea advice
Oh - the other thing that can mitigate Pangaea's sacred troops being capitol only is finding Amazon provinces. In a large enough game, the odds are fairly good you'll find one or two provinces with at least jade or onyx amazons, albeit crystal and garnet are much more rare.
The great thing about finding these is that if you're playing a heavy bless strategy, you now have a new sacred type to bring into play. If I'm not mistaken, each type of Amazon has a sacred troop - Nightmares, Gryphon Riders, etc. But this is actually true of bless strategies in general, not specific to Pangaea, and is still gambling. Either you find a way to move your sacred troops to the combat lines (gateway, Flying Ship, Faery Trod, etc) or they may not do you enough good. Hmmm. Anything other than Amazon provinces give other (non-national, non-summoned) sacred troops? [ June 01, 2004, 04:03: Message edited by: Cainehill ] |
Re: Pangaea advice
I did some testing with the following.
Lord of Nature, 4 nature, 1 blood, 3 turmoil, 0 prod, 3 luck, 2 magic. I immediately recruited a pan to attract maenads. Then I recruited a mino commander and made him my prophet and set him on hold/cast*5, attack closest and put him in the center with 2-5 minos on hold, attack closest. He is really strong in battles! My first army was composed of my pretender, prophet and that white centaur commander (forgot it's name). With indies strength of 8, I started capturing provinces at turn 5. I would capture a province, search it and capture the next. At the mean time I recruited pans and dryads ( for research) in my capital. At turn 12 I had four pans and started receiving a fair amount of maenads each turn. I plan next to employ a second strong army to capture strong indie provinces and then employ stealthy teams of centaur warriors to capture lightly guarded enemy provinces. I slapped some minor magic items on my pretender and truth is he's performing very well in battles. Thanks for all the advice. |
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sacred units
..there's a site that lets you recruit danoine sidhe, witches are holy, too .. Panaea You may want to try out my Pangaea mod ... beefs up the Satyrs somewhat, but without unbalancing the nation. Some more minor changes, too... Don't buy more than 2 Pans in the first 20 turns if you're going with turmoil-3 ... they are mucho expensive with 23,3 gp/turn just for upkeep. And you won't be able to get rid of all those maenads anyway if you keep at least one of them in a decent dominion. I usually put on in my army and have on sitting in a lab in a border castle, doing nature summonings and forgings and generating maenads. And while a minotaur prophet makes a great combat unit, but not a real SC, boosting a dryad to priest-4 makes her much more invaluable especially considering the low morale most pangaeans troops have. if you really want a minotaur prophet, wait for that national hero - one more reason to go for the turmoil-3/luck-3 path: Pangaeas national heros are just so useful!! Ok, have to leave now http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif |
Re: Pangaea advice
Graeme is right, of course. (Darn that Graeme!) Pans aren't sacred. (Darn those Pans!) I still don't find the idea of a nature blessing all that attractive, though. Because the warriors already have some berserking ability, for one thing. And for another, you'll be putting lots of points into Nature magic on your Pretender, when your Pans are already extremely good at it.
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Re: Pangaea advice
The biggest Pangaean advice that is more than often overlooked is:
Stealth Preachers. Cheap, easy Temples thrown up and stealth preachers allow you to take a generally lower domain than you would using most other nations. While letting you focus your Domain where you need it most (in offensives). |
Re: Pangaea advice
This thread got my interest in this race fired up again, so I started a new game. I built a Pretender with Death five, which gives blessed units lesser fear. I have been using a nice horde of holy centaurs in combination with the Panic spell and some archers to good effect.
I put the centaurs on hold and attack nearest, the archers fire at nearest and script Panic for a pair of mages. By the time the enemy troops get close, they have reduced moral due to spells and arrow fire. The centaurs charge in, deal out some more damage and their lesser fear effect adds to the total “fear factor”. Perhaps not a game winning strategy, but it is a nice combination of small things adding up to turn a lot of battles for me. My Pretender is the Carrion Dragon, Stinky, and he also has a good fear effect. The thing is that he got cursed in his first battle and spends most of his time with massive battle afflictions. I mostly use him for searching and the occasion battle when healthy, but were he not cursed, he would fit nicely into the fear combination listed above. Any suggestions on how to boost this strategy would be welcome. |
Re: Pangaea advice
Hmm, well doesn't Pangaea have a N1 "spell song" for causing fear? You could maybe throw some Dryads into the mix, casting that one. They have Awe, which combined with the fact that you're lowering the morale of all your enemies ought to make them tough to hit.
Just watch out for those evil undead. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif |
Re: Pangaea advice
While probably not a MP-viable strategy, I have considered two strategies for Pangaea, one that I've tested.
1) Maenad hordes. Under this strategy, you don't use Pangaean national troops. You just hire Pans, who attract Maenads, who make up your army. As others have said, it doesn't take long for the Maenads to get completely out of hand. 20 Maenads aren't much of an issue, but 200 of them are. 2) Maenad Blood. With this, you use the same strategy as above, but instead of attacking with all of them, you use the Maenads to patrol to control the unrest from Bloodhunting with Pandemoniacs. Probably a better long-term strategy, in that you'll have Blood summons as the core of your army instead of endless hordes of Maenads. Just an idea or two. Scott |
Re: Pangaea advice
Pangaea is one of my favorite nations. And of course everyone can come up with their own methods of play. But Im always amazed at how many people want to play Pangaea as though it was Ulm.
Im sorry but to me the built-in advantage of Pangaea is its sneak ability. All of my strategys are built around the sneak ability. I might be playing them offensively, defensively, magic push, items push, assassination push, or strong alliance; but it will still be making major use of the sneak ability. Just my opinion. |
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Besides, its not thematic for Maenads to be good patrolers. They like Turmoil! Send them out to patrol, they'll probably start breaking stuff and setting it on fire. Furthermore, they're naked. How, I ask you, can a bunch of naked women prowling around make things calmer? Especially when they start running into their families, ex-boyfriends, etc.
Oh, and regarding my comment about watching out for the undead... I was thinking in terms of how none of this fear stuff will do anything to units that know no fear. But of course Norfleet is perfectly right, the Dryads are powerful priests. So all the more reason to throw them into the mix. |
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Is the right side the front and the left side the back in your diagram, like in the troop deployment screen?
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For items, since Pangaea can develop a blood income fairly easily, you'll probably want a hell sword or blood thorn. You'll also want quickness boots if you don't have water magic, and flying boots if you do. An antimagic amulet and starshine skullcap are both excellent to reduce the chance that you are killed instantly. I'd also add a luck pendant to cause half of all damage causing effects to miss. That basically leaves the armour slot for whatever you want t put there. You'll want your protection to be over 20 once buffed, without making your encumbrance too large, and without reducing your defense skill too much. |
Re: Pangaea advice
I like to mix satyrs with maenads. Yes I know that people dont like them because they rout easily. But one of the advantages of maenads is their higher morale. I dont do formula tests well so I dont have a good percentage mix but it does seem to help the overall damage.
[ June 06, 2004, 15:25: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ] |
Re: Pangaea advice
But why satyrs and not revelers? The 3 gold difference in price? That is a fair bargain for what you get with revelers (high morale, berserk), and you'll be able to afford it if you took order (otherwise, you can just use maenads all the way). I find revelers to be one of the best light troops for soaking up the damage so that your precious heavy troops can deal some serious punisment later. Yet, nobody seems to share my viewpoint about them for some reason, while at the same time nearly everybody is stating that satyrs suck because of their morale. Why is that so? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif
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Re: Pangaea advice
Please tell me what you think the following early game troop deployment:
PanX2__________________________________MaeX10 __________________MaeX100 ___________Mino(X10)____________________Pret Pans are scripted for panic, Maenads at front on hold and attack close(arrow fodder), Maenads in middle on default, minos on hold and attack rear and pretender (lord of nature) on enhance spells and attack rear. I am not sure about the Mino position, they are too slow for a flank attack. maybe I should replace them with centaur warriors. Also I'm not sure about the possible addition of centaur archers. Oh and another question If I may. How best to turn my LON(lord of nature) into a SC. Best artifacts, spells etc. [ June 06, 2004, 12:54: Message edited by: izaqyos ] |
Re: Pangaea advice
3 gold more is a lot for light infantry. An ordinary satyr costs 9-10, right (I haven't been paying much attention since I never use 'em)? Well, add 3 gold per man and you pay a third more.
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I haven't tried it, because I tend to prefer NE Pangaea, but the whole idea of a maened army sounds very appealing to me, especially with a few choice buff spells, such as Mass Protection and that spell that makes everyone go berserk (of course maeneds usually go berserk anyways). If you have a pretender with air magic casting Fog Warriors is a great way to make maeneds even better, and if you have earth, spells like Weapons of Sharpness and such can help out a lot.
Of course the one thing you won't want to face with a horde of maeneds is a SC with some kind of life-stealing weapon... |
Re: Pangaea advice
Responding to your battle plan, izaqyos, I would not use Minotaurs as flankers. As you pointed out, they're rather slow for that sort of duty. I also think you'd be better off in splitting up your Maenads a bit more, and I would definitely put some in front of your Pretender. Otherwise he could get beat up by your opponent's fast flankers before he finishes casting his spells.
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If you are using swarms of maenads, I suggest leaving the archers out of the mix. It is not just that the sound effect of a dying maenad will drive you to hate friendly fire, it is that you should spend your cash on the heavy cav. Once the swarm hits, you can often race down the edges and smash the rear units. If they don’t go all the way, they join in the general melee which is positive.
The archers, on the other hand, rarely damage the rear echelon of the enemy and they almost always severely damage your maenads. In my opinion, the heavies are far better value than the archers when you have lots of light troops. And yes, the undead are rather annoying to fight with this race, especially when I have gone down the panic route. Had some problems over the weekend. As has been said a hundred times before, Ermor is not that tough, especially if you have lots of priests. I found summon Lasmantas (sorry for the spelling) was nice, as my nature gems created spell casters who could send out streams of undead to fight the undead. However, when Ulm chooses to hit you from the left and Ermor is gnawing on your right, even the AI can beat you… |
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