Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

I'd like to play with my friends using this theme. But I have read forum Posts where a lot of people got disappointed with this theme, being difficult and unbalanced.
The Posts were old so I hope the Last patches have corrected and rebalanced this theme. Is this true? Is playable or I will be bashed by Vans, witch hunters and fire lizards?

Thank you

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

It's playable. It has a number of weaknesses and deficiencies, but it's not the worst thing in the book, either, as of 2.12. I wouldn't rank it among the top-5 most competitive for the most people, but if it fits your niche, you can easily do well with it. Alas, it still does sort of play kinda like a watered-down Version of Ermor.

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

does CW eat population at the same rate as AE?

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

CW has a killer dominion, although its slower.

But then, CW has to take growth scale for nothing (okay, it slightly increases the chance of spawning carrion creatures in your provinces)which gives you less points than a comparable AE Pretender would get

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">yeah -160 points for pretenderdesign http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">how quick does ermor kill population ?
4/5% for sg / ae per level of dominion or 4/5% in general ?
cw kills 1% per level of dominion right ?

a minor drawback with cw : the castles + the carrion lords / ladies produce supplies .
so if you are "unlucky" with events and get free militia every 3 turns you have to suicide them which sometimes isn't so easy ^^ .
they are so fearful that they often start running when the first arrows hit ^^.
with ermor they fortunately starve quickly http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

i like the trampling carrion beasts with almost 100 hp . they're like free behemoths http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

I found the masses of mandragoras rather interesting, myself. Each length-5 Sleep Vine gets up to three attacks per turn, for 33 armor-negating fatigue points each. But you do need to have a large critical mass; even pretty hefty numbers get slaughtered by knights and longbowmen or even HI+crossbows, due to lack of shield, armor, speed, or good back-up battle magic (compared to death). So early expansion might be slower than Ermor.

AE (and especially SG, which gets free unholy priests) wins the leader race -- CW doesn't get free leaders auto-spawning, nor do even its Carrion Lords have death magic, so it can't chain-summon the way Ermorian Dusk Elders can.

There may also be a bug with Puppet Mastery; I've watched it be cast over and over, on large hordes, and through random right-clicking have never, ever seen it actually appear to get through unit MR. Perhaps it's not working, or perhaps it does but the bonuses don't show. It's mostly a waste of a leader's turn.

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

Puppet mastery works, but it doesn't show on the stats. It reduces the cost to move by half (IIRC) and doesn't affect the AP's of the beast. Increased AP would give more attacks as well and the spell is only intended to make the critters move quicker. Therefore it might be difficult to notice the effects of the spell.

Place a couple of horse-carrion at the flanks or rear and have them attack rear. They move incredibly fast when enchanted.

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

Think of it as a weaker Version of Ashen Empire

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

Mandragoras make incredible SC killers. They do have other vulnerabilities and take a while to acchieve sufficient numbers, though.

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

CW's problem is that their troops, while fairly effective, almost all have very low protection and defense, and no shields. This means that they usually take high casualties, especially against archers and battle mages.

On the other hand - given enough numbers, they do handle things like knights and heavy cavalry fairly well; probably 2 to 4 carrion critters dies for each knight, which compares well to most normal units.

They do generate enough carrion dogs and other high movement creatures to serve as effective cavalry, especially with Puppet Mastery.

CW does take some ... management of the troops. Given that the first carrion critters to reach the enemy are going to die (especially against cavalry and such), you want to put your lesser carrion in the first wave - normal manikins, carrion chickens, carrion piglets, etc. This way they take the brunt of the initial losses, conserving the more valuable carrion.

Another way to spruce up the carrion bunnies is to add some vine men / vine ogres. Forge a Vine Crown and a Treelords staff and one dryad can summon 4 vine ogres for 1 nature gem. (Skip the staff and she can get ... 3 vine men? Or 2?) The nice thing about the vine walkers is that they don't have any upkeep and don't eat, just like your carrion, but they in effect dissipate the effect of banishment.

It also takes some management and creativity to gear up the gem income and research needed. Nature gems are best used for generating your carrion lords (who are best used to reanimate), rather than carrion ladies or centaurs. (The carrion chicks are okay for research, given that they have no upkeep, but there are better ways to go.)

So - since CW also has death mages and income, you want to ... generate undead mages. If you don't find sages or some other high value researchers to recruit (sparingly because CW has a cash flow problem), then revenants can be very cost effective, especially since a skull staff allows a revenant to summon more revenants. Another thing to do is use some of those death gems to build Skull Mentors - 10 death gems for an extra 9 research is pretty cost effective, even more so if you can get a dwarven hammer or two along the way.

Of course, to _get_ the dwarven hammer, and other decent forgings and summonings, I find you need to go with a fairly broad range of magic on the pretender - I like to have Earth 4 as well as Nature and Death at least 3, and preferably 1 or 2 more elements at 3 or higher. (Not the other sorceries - having to use a pretender to blood hunt isn't very effective, and Astral - well, Astral would be okay on an immortal Pretender. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif )

The broad range of magic allows the pretender to find magic sites CW would otherwise miss, many of which give recruitable mages, and allows some of the mid to high level items and rituals to be handled by the pretender.

In addition, even without any magic on the pretender, CW can eventually get some decent mages via death and nature, and will need to : spectres and mound kings from death, Lamia Queens from nature, which will eventually be able to summon Couatls for Astral magic.

Along the way, CW definately does need a bit of luck in finding magic sites. It's definately not an overpowered theme, but it can be fun and can give some of the other nations a run for their divinity.

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

actually, other then a holy 4 prophit, carrion lord and ladies reanimate roughly the same number of critters. I did a test on this once, reanimating in provinces with no dominion for 10 turns, if I remeber corectly centairs averaged 3-5, ladies and lords 13-15, and the holy 4 prophit 32. This is becuase the formula divides the unholy power in half and rounds down. so 2 and 3 have the same value. So use revenats for reseach, ladies to reanimate, and lords to lead the armies, giving a lord a crystal shield if you can forge one will help alot too, letting you cast the best unholy spells. As for the centairs, they can be used to round up the auto spawns, but not much else.

odd_enuf

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Interesting - I never did tests with the ladies vice lords, though I did know there was some question whether the lord was better than the lady, because of rounding.

I definately agree about the centaurs - okay for rounding up spawns, but the enchantment-2 Mound King has seemed like a better deal for 3 death gems, albeit they can't reanimate while defending temples the way a centaur can.

I still prefer the carrion lords to the ladies though - huge HPs for a mage (52?), and their N3 magic makes them much more worthwhile in combat and out, imo. Being able to cast Mend the Dead is very nice also, as they can heal themselves, the carrion elephants, and also the Carrion Dragon pretender very well.

Glad to hear the Unholy 4 Prophet reanimates so well - I've been trying to get my prophet killed off in one game to make a Carrion Lord the pretender, but in the meantime, planted the Sword of Injustice on one and set him to reanimating at unholy 4.

Which reminds me - my feeling is that it's best to make the initial centaur commander the prophet right away, in order to reanimate, to help push dominion, and also so he can lead carrion critters. If you don't do this, he leads the satyrs, okay, but I've found it unprofitable to recruit normal troops with CW, making him fairly worthless unless you make him the prophet.

(One alternative I've played with is recruiting a Panic Apostate the first turn, making him the Prophet the second. The main benefit to this, imo, is that it has a sizable effect on upkeep, lowering the Pan's ongoing cost by over 10. Money being tight for CW, this helps a lot - since you don't want to 'waste' your pretender by keeping him at home summoning carrion commanders, you need a Pan fairly early.)

After you get going awhile, the centaur doesn't cut it - you'd much rather have a carrion lord (or possibly the ettin hero) for a prophet. Happily, most games the centaur gets killed off before turn 30 or so. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

I prefer the lords because the can cast mass protection. You definately get your monies worth out of that one nature gem with that spell.

if its true that ladies summon the same amount as lord though (and have the same chance for the mino's, bears, and behemoths???), then Maybe it's worth the extra gem and loss of troops for one turn to give them a thistle staff.

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">That's not what I noticed myself: Pangaean reanimation = unholy power, ie 1 for Centaurs, 2 for Ladies, 3 for Lords, 4 for a prophet Lord.

BTW, if you want to know (without guesswork) how many units you get from the commands 'Reanimate' and 'Summon Allies', or thru passive auto-summoning, put a single unit in the reanimator's first squad. Your new units will appear there instead of in the garrison.

Re: Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?
 

Carrion centaurs get a nice offense with a fire 9 blessing. Don't know how usefull it is, but it is nice to see a niefel jarl get killed in one attack.