A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Sometimes its fun to play a nation in an unexpected way. Rather than going with the obvious synergies that you’ve seen the nation played with over and over again you can often come up with a competitive build for a nation that really surprises your opponents expecting the same old same old. Pangaea, yawn, all I have to do is be able to wade through hoards of barkskin’ed maenads and pop vine critters, right?

EA Pangaea has some really nice units, and some generally under utilized synergies. The problem is those great units are fairly expensive and their (glaringly non sacred) good mages are extremely expensive…while turmoil is “always” taken. Instead of planning our nation around maenads and dryads (weak sauce) lets design our nation around the top shelf stuff. Now, of course everything I lay out here is available to a certain extent regardless of the build you go with, it’s just a matter of focus.

Pans do generate maenads at a (much) slower rate in a neutral order/turmoil scale. The ability goes away if there are order scales, so the sweet spot here is neutrality. The lower maenad output will be somewhat compensated by the fact that we’re going to be having more Pans but we’re certainly going to be having a significant amount less maenads than the classic Pangaea build. You know what? That’s ok, you’ll still have plenty of warm bodies for castle defense/storming, decoys, etc. – you just won’t be trying to run out the battle timer before your opponent can chew through your endless hordes. The thing is, there’s actually a fairly small amount of times that 1000 maenads are much better than 200 – either your opponent can chew through a whole bunch of them or not.

The other prong of our strategy is going to be very sensitive to our upkeep. Pans are great, but you’re going to rapidly find the upkeep eating you alive. Your high end troops are also great, but expensive troops means expensive upkeep. So, how do we focus on our good stuff without quickly becoming unwieldy? Well, we focus on efficiency, we’ll be using smaller numbers of good units instead of a bunch of crap.

White centaurs are not as good as the real top class sacreds, but they are still pretty good and quite capable of dominating most indies very economically. The great thing about them too, is they will benefit substantially from almost any blessing you want to take so you’ve got a lot of flexibility in taking a pretender. Even just mid level blessings like F4, W4, N4, E4, B4 will provide a noticeable boost, but of course the big versions of all of those are very welcome as well (well, B8 that is…no point in B9). The details are gonna vary depending on exactly what you decide to go with, but it’s generally not too hard to field an expansion party every turn from your cap pretty quickly. Note, for the first few turns we are gonna be using dryads, but we’ll switch to focusing on Pans fairly soon. A pretty aggressive expansion and fairly good income scales (for Pangaea at least) while leveraging cost effective sacred expansion parties will see your income spike pretty fast.

Before you really start cranking out the Pans you’re going to want to castle up a bit. Having a bunch of castles gets you several things. First, it bumps up your income – even more differentiating your income from the ‘standard’ Pangaea build. Second, you’re shortly going to be sitting on a whole bunch of maeanads, making storming your castles very, very difficult. Third, you’ve got three different non-mage national commanders that you’re gonna want to steadily crank out. Lastly, having a bunch of castles allows you to pump troops out very quickly if you need them, so you can avoid having them sitting around eating up all your income when you don’t. You’re gonna find that it’s not that hard to get to the point that all of your income can be spent cranking out Pans – but don’t do that (at this point). Instead steadily invest in putting up more castles while modestly building up your Pans. Don’t worry about putting labs up in all those castles, at this point in the game just pump out black harpies. With a swarm of those flying dudes there’s a good chance you’ll the best intel available to any player in the early game. Your temples are only 200 gold, so it can be well worthwhile to get a bunch of Centaur Hierophants to stick vine bows on early (constr-0). With a high precision & strength, several of these guys working together will do a pretty good job of locking down anything super heavy that gives you trouble early on (like enemy pretenders). This works way better than casting tangling vines as you’ve got 24 ammunition and no option to go off script so a few guys working together have a very good chance of keeping one or two enemy big guys unable to do anything for a good long while. Centaurs can also be a great way to add a touch of unexpected lightning damage with thunder bows if you can line up somebody like Obscuro or trade for them. When you’re ready to go a-raiding, black harpies have 10 leadership, and 10 (non sacred) centaurs are a perfectly reasonable PD raiding squad, so you can do fun stuff with very broad sneak attacks having a dozen such squads (spit out of all those castles) having snuck all over enemy territory before they know what’s going on. You can play quite aggressively against plenty of nations with no magic support at all now that you’re focusing on your good units…but then again why would you want to go with no magic support?

Pans are expensive, but the upkeep problem is not really gonna start hitting you immediately. What is going to hit you immediately is how fast your research piles up early. Each one of those pans spits out 10-11 research in a magic-1 scale, which is 2-3 times as much as many nation’s research mages. Sure, you’ve got an abysmal gold cost per research point but in raw research points piling up while people are mostly constrained by how many forts they’ve got you’re very fast out the gate. You have a little bit of breathing room before the upkeep starts pulling you down, and you can make a lot with it.

With this ticking clock of upkeep piling up you’ve got one urgent goal, probably no surprise but I think B-lining for transformation is critical for this strategy. The great news is that alteration research is where you want to focus anyway so there’s not really much of an opportunity cost. Depending on what you need on the battlefield it may make sense to swing up and get summon earthpower, and there are a couple other relatively low level stuff I’ll discuss in a bit that you may need to pick up for a specific situation, but by default just punch alteration all the way – you’ll climb it pretty fast with your speed out the gate.

On your way up to transformation you’ll pick up…
Level 3:

Protection – don’t overlook this very early edge. Just two dryads (or Pans) can cover a dozen of “hold and attack” centaurs which brings them up to the level of real top level sacreds.

Curse of stones – unless you get a very lucky early random you’ll probably have to pick up summon earthpower before this is an option – but it’s a serious war-winning spell against the right nation. Most people don’t realize how good this spell can be, but if you have 2-3 Pans cast it at the beginning of a big fight (like as you’re attacking an enemy cap) it’s gonna come close to knocking out half the enemy melee effectiveness if they’ve got human-esq 10 MR. No other battlefield wide spells are available anywhere near as early. As the game progresses don’t forget about this little gem – add some penetration boosters and the range of usefulness opens up quite a bit.

Level 4:
Destruction – You can use this lightly without summon earthpower by passing out E gems, but this is the other big reason you might want to detour briefly to conjuration. Those high defense, 2 attacking good strength centaur warriors are pretty damn scary when your armor all falls off…but what is even better is combo’ing that with those high precision longbow wielding centaur archers. It’s hard to make them cost effective without that combo, but with it almost any enemy troops will die way faster than they can chew through your modest amounts of maenads and...

Swarm – There are many great uses for this spell, not the least of which is to give your opponent one more layer of stuff to chew on while destruction and arrows decimate them. You’ve got a great N income and having mages who can pump this out for several turns makes it very hard for many enemy strats.

Level 5:

Mother oak. I know, taking N on your pretender for Pangaea is counterintuitive, but it gets you a lot of stuff when you think about it (more on that in a bit), not the least of which is being all but guaranteed to get the mother oak up with no need to do construction research or count on a lucky early random. Mother oak is important because as good as your nature income is going to be you’re going to have an equally high appetite. A N blessing also works surprisingly good on the white centaurs – their defense is high enough that they don’t get hit with that high a frequency, their hps are high enough that it takes several hits to take them down, and their protection (particularly once they berserk) means a bit of regen can account for mid range hits.

Wooden Warriors – Well, now all your centaurs should be substantial bad asses, including the non-sacred ones. That regen bless starts looking really good now – it takes a substantial sustained damage output to bring those 20+ defense, 20+ protection, 20+ hp guys down when they’re regenning several points per turn. Giants can’t hit them because of their D, smaller guys can’t damage them fast enough.

Iron warriors – This works great on something like a small group of vanguard white centaurs to bring them up to ‘absurdly difficult to kill’. Now drop destruction around them without worrying too much about a little friendly fire and let those bows do a good impression of a machine gun. We’ve also got some other very nasty uses for this spell I’ll get into in a minute.

Level 6:
Iron Bane- This works great with centaurs along with the protection buffs you’re dropping, but more importantly it opens up some strong tactics for important fights. A clever opponent is going to try to deploy in such a way as to make destruction difficult to land. Iron bane though, there’s no way for him to dodge. The thing about iron bane is it requires a melee hit to destroy the armor, making it a much less effective combo with your archers, unless….you could find some light flyers to run up and tap the bad guy’s shield once. Mmmm, how does chewing through that swarm spam sound now as the arrows rain down? This also turns harpies into a substantial threat all by themselves. You can mass them quickly and easily, and with two claw attacks you can often have a decent shot at doing heinous enough damage to the enemy in your first strike that they break without even a retaliatory hit. This strat scales up very nicely as you end up stacking on strength of giants/rush of strength and panic/blood rain. Then again, harpies are cheap enough to use as kamikazes anyway, so if they do get popped you won’t lose any sleep.

Petrify – Oh, lament the loss of the blood stone! You’re gonna have trouble using this early on, but it’s worthwhile to go through a bit of effort to use later on as nothing says love like unresistable paralyzation in combination with the nasty stuff I detail down below. What kind of effort? Sabaath works out well if you’re already bringing several Pans to a fight. Have the slaves dropping the above buffs while the masters spam petrify and reinvigoration. Alternatively summon hellpower is not that hard to pull off, and vine critters make great horror popping bodyguards.

Level 7:

Marble warriors: Yeah, obviously your centaurs are now the stuff of nightmares, but don’t overlook how this folds in with the harpy/iron bane strat I just suggested.

Transformation. In my MA Oceana guide I went into why transformation is such a great deal, and I don’t want to repeat it but I will say that if you use it for nothing at all other than research mages (you know, those 10 rp ones?) its in the longer term kinda like pumping out 10rp skull mentors for 3N without the need for a hammer or any limit to how many you can do per turn (you can cast it with every one of your Pans the turn you get it). Obviously you want to save up your N gems leading into getting it, but having the mother oak up along with your naturally strong N income it shouldn’t really be a problem. At this point your upkeep is going to rapidly evaporate and you can now put labs in all those extra castles until you can crank out a stupid number of Pans each turn. Your research is going to explode – and as I’ve gone at lengths to illustrate the path to get here leaves you very strong through the whole thing.

As scary as all that so far sounds, remember we’re still pretty early in the game and you’ve got all kinds of nastiness still to bring to the party. Clever opponents are hardly gonna be content to line up their guys as convenient centaur/destruction targets, so lets look at some fun stuff in your arsenal when they try and get cute. We’ve worked hard to drop our upkeep on the Pans, you’ll also want to prune back the number of centaurs and other upkeep producing troops you have. You’ll always have a spot for them, but you’ll continue to aim at smaller numbers of really tough guys and supplement with summons and maenads. (yes, your transformed Pans stop producing them, but you’ve got a steady stream of new Pans so you’ll still find nekid ladies always underfoot)

Regeneration is nice, easy low hanging fruit at enchant-3. This is certainly an option to keep in mind to stack on top of the centaur-centric main line tactic, but even better is to consider some higher hitpoint stuff that’ll gain even more of a benefit. With ench-3 you also get dragon master, so having a pan or two summoning cave drakes is a great little side strat – when those dudes are regenerating it practically forces your opponent to go with a counter specifically to them which is different than everything else you’re doing. If your opponent doesn’t happen to have a counter there they can be practically impossible to get through while your other stuff dishes out nasty damage. What’s even better though is…

With upkeep free blood hunters you can eventually be quite a blood powerhouse…though be mindful of the opportunity cost of sacrificing gold income and all those upkeep free Pans. With a very, very modest blood income though you can crank out a hell of a lot of dark vines. As anybody who’s run into these guys as indies knows they can be pretty scary with over a hundred hitpoints and 3 armor piercing attacks. You drop regeneration on them and that nice large amount of hitpoints is growing back at 12 per turn….and remember how I said I had further nasty uses for iron warriors? Ah, now there’s something you really don’t mind dropping destruction around while the bad guys do a great impression of running into a brick wall! This also works wonderfully with poison cloud as they’re poison immune. These guys move slow enough that a single pan can buff 2 of them with both these buffs, so its really not that hard to have 6-10 of them where they need to be and your opponent is not gonna be pleased. Then again, at 3 blood slaves apiece you’re also pretty easily able to mass more impressive numbers once you are looking at marble warriors and mass regen. They’ve got a 15 MR and are mindless (no soul slay, paralyze, etc.) so it’s actually fairly difficult to field a good counter to them.

Now, what about fighting really tough stuff? Hinnom or Neifelheim or Fomoria think they can ignore your centaurs and chop up your dark vines, eh? Well, there’s one more non mage commanders that’s a great idea to churn out from your labless castles. Oh man, having a stable of minotaur lords is so nasty it makes me giggle.

That modest blood income you’ve got should mean you’ve got an essentially unlimited number of flesheater axes. Flesheater axes give you a +3 berserk. Use that mother oak fueled N income to crank out a whole bunch of lycanthrop amulets. These give your minotaur lords 3 regen and +4 strength, and more importantly auto-berserks them at the start of the fight…with an 8 berserk rating. That brings your strength up to…29, with an attack of 19. The axe hits for an impressive 14 damage with a 3 attack….so that’s 43 damage with a 22 attack. You can stick a second flesheater easily enough, though if you’re attacking high defense SCs it’s probably better to go with something like a hunter’s knife to keep your dual wield attack values up – and a ring of the warrior can be a very nice budget accessory to let you avoid shields. Not much is tough enough to even care about the chest wounds! Now, it’s probably not going to come as a surprise at this point that I’m going to suggest how this looks when you toss iron warriors on those badasses. With that +8 berserk value those minotaurs are now at a 30 protection, with 29 hitpoins and 3 regen. Slap a dozen maenads on guard commander with each of them, along with a couple swarms to keep the enemy broken up and they are very hard to take down fast and hit just about as hard as anything in the game. At 40 gold, 5 slaves and 5N (plus whatever second weapon you want) your opponent is going to get *very* tired of seeing these guys. Remember how I said petrify’s unresistable paralyzation was gonna hurt? Imagine that spammed from behind a bunch of these charging buzzsaws…

Hehe, now the extra evil, nasty barb in here to – nobody is gonna wanna get in melee with those minotaurs so mages are going to be brought in to deal with them. If the enemy mages are successful, there’s a good chance they’ll pick up a lycanthrops amulet at the end of the battle and forever be worthless for combat – eventually switching to a skinshifter and not being a mage at all. You can avoid a similar fate on your Pans by shoving cheap blood items like SDRs or warrior rings into their slots…or better yet lifelong protections. This is really, really nasty as the bad guys get busy fighting imps and thus don’t notice the avalanche charging towards them. If you’ve got the blood slaves lifelong protections are great investments (they work fine at 2 per commander) – it’s a never ending supplement to the swarms you’re casting. They’re a bit expensive, but you don’t have too much demand on your blood economy so they’re a reasonable choice for the overflow. As long as you’re going for it though you may want to stick black hearts in the Pan’s second misc slot – lifelong protection + charm is naaaasty in an assassination. Or leech if that sounds better. Point is the imps will often pin the bad guy and bodyguards for long enough to make him very unhappy.

Note: those minotaur lords are going to trample anybody smaller than size 3…which can certainly be effective enough, but you’re better off using regular minotaurs with marble warriors + haste if that’s the direction you want to go.

On the longer term horizion, as I’ve laid out you’ve got a good reason to take N on your pretender, and you struggle a bit for magic diversity I think it also makes a lot of sense to take a little D on your pretender so you can easily get into llamia queens. You can also use this to get some vinecritter generators early on if they seem like they’d help. Once you get to llamia queens though you get some nice further nastiness to drop. Crank out a bunch of bane venom charms and use them with flocks of black harpies. You can leave them in your lab, then when you need them rapidly converge a bunch of the harpies on labs then sneak them right into the path of an advancing army. Having 6 or more of these deployed thusly will do a good job of diseasing a significant portion of the enemy army as well as the commanders – and you don’t have to wait till you’re being invaded…do this as one neighbor invades the other and they’ll both be easy pickings as the winner’s army withers. Another fun thing you can do is use the fact that the harpies fly to hop over a couple enemy provinces to make it look like a bunch of bane venom laden scouts are sneaking in from another nation’s border. *whistles innocently* No need to just wait on one of your neighbors to decide to invade another. Note: for longer deployments you can use a lycanthrop amulet for cheap regen on the harpies so they don’t die, but you can also just rotate the bane venom charm to another harpy and let the first one recouperate.

Llamia queens also get you vamp lords (assuming your pretender didn’t), or with more modest research vamps. 200 gold temples + blood sac and vamps can be very tempting, particularly as you’ve already got access to darkness + marble warriors + iron bane makes vamps…unpleasant. Late game, pushing for the big blood research is tempting as Rush of Strength is nasty with Iron Bane, Infernal Crusades are pretty scary along with blood rain and panic spam, leech + black hearts + lifelong protections will cause some swearing…and blood vengeance + invulnerability + person regeneration is just what those few Pans that transformed into something scary want. If you’re so inclined you can leverage the llamia queens/vamp lords into fairly strong death access. Fairy court adds some welcome diversity to A. As with several nations you’ve got a glaring lack of astral magic and no easy way to rectify it, but with the rest of your hand being nice and strong this shouldn’t be crippling.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

As someone who swore never to play Pan with Turmoil 3 again, I like this guide. One question, are the more limited #s of Maenads with neutral scales worth it as opposed to just forgetting about them and going for Order-3? Pan loves $. I grew to despise Maenads for the micro-supply issues and their susceptibility to getting squashed with RoS when attempting to use them offensively.

PS the bane venom frame technique is hilariously evil!

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Well, the maenads are worth it for the seige domination (offensive and defensive) by itself. They're also great to have handful as screens whenever you feel like tossing them out (enemy mages love the high amount of damage they can deliver to them, have them as single use bodygaurds for minotaur thugs). I do think order would be the way to go over the maenads anyway, if it wasn't also a 120 design point swing.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Very good interesting guide Baalz, but how do you deal with mind hunts on your low MR mages with little to no astral?

Perhaps since you already have conjuration for llamia queens, specters deserve a mention? Or perhaps there is a better way...

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Nice guide. Agreed on most points and I think the way you lay out the key goals for this nation is very well done. I do agree with the bit about Transformation since it's rare to have an abundance of nature gems lying around but Pan can really roll with them so it seems a nice fit as well as a Baalz signature move (haha). Kudos =)

Btw, you already know this but point out how harpy troops are AMAZING patrollers!

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Awww, I guess I waited too long to finish up my ideas on EA Pan. Well, I do have one thing to mention about the troops. Revelers are nightmarish. A reveler, once berserk and given Protection by a dryad is 15 HP, Prot 16, Enc 4, Def 10, which hits with 2 attacks at skill 15 each dealing 18 damage, then 15 damage. Three per square. One needs an awful lot of defence to prevent all those hits (the last one from a square is effectively at attack skill 37) and an awful lot of protection to make 18 damage hits meaningless. Awe is useless. Fear is useless. These guys want nothing more from life than opportunities to shove a hoof down some poor bastard's throat, then dance around wearing his esophagus as a sock.

Of course, centaurs are also very good, but there are three key differences. One, centaurs have shields. Yeah, they're vital for the fact that they can handle archers much more readily. Two, revelers are cheaper. 14 gold versus 40 gold per unit is a HUGE difference to the ever-gold-hungry Pangaea, especially since you really want to scrimp and save in the beginning to get another fort or two. Third and finally, revelers are six awesome attacks per square instead of four. Centaurs clear a square of enemies pretty reliably with four attacks, but revelers almost always obliterate whatever they're facing.

If you're willing to focus more on the revelers, then you gain a little bit in terms of bless flexibility. I realize you're not going for a big bless anyway, but pangaea wants those pretender points in so many places that sometimes having a couple paths at 3 instead of 4 is some welcome slack.

Give reveler expansion parties a shot, with a couple centaurs to screen from archers. You won't be disappointed.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Well there are a couple more differences. Revelers cause unrest, which hits that income. Revelers have less hitpoints per unit, along with less defense and protection which means there is more attrition. Revelers not actively fighting can either be stashed in your own territory building up your unrest, or snuck into enemy territory where you hope he doesn't notice and decide you're about to attack him. Revelers do get torn up pretty good by arrows/javelins, which you can mitigate somewhat but still will bite you occasionally. Revelers have a mapmove of 2 and run across the battlefield half as fast. You are right though, that they can certainly deal more aggressive damage and you can do a decent expansion with them, but I'm I don't think you could do anywhere near as economical an initial expansion with them as you could with the brown centaurs, much less the white.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Was half way through your post but could not wait to ask as everything so far seems quite relevant for MA:

I am going to play a MA Pangea MP game and was considering a heavy F and W bless alongside some decent order and production scales to play the sacred/armour strat.

What, if anythng major, in your post you think may not be too applicable to MA Pangea?

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

So, how does this build deal with astral nations?- Mind hunt for example?- Stellar cascades spam?

On the battlefield fire and light. damage seem like Achilles heal of the build. Fire storm?- Wrath. skies?

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Armies of Gold =D

And also astral nations are bad for anyne without astral access innate but I do believe lamia can get spectres => astral which sneaks to protect vs mind hunt. However, there will be a vulnerable time post transform pre spectre, where you'd have to take care. Stellar spam isn't too bad since you got decent armor and relief! <= why is this spell not mentioned?!

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

AoG is Pawned by Air Evoc.

Stellar ain't that bad but all the astral arsenal is very bad news for this build.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

What build can change that? An Astral pretender can only be in one place at a time. There aren't cheap Astral mage summons you can bootstrap into. Death gets you into spectres, which is probably your best bet. With only 1 S mage you're not going to have gems to abuse anyway.

One astral mage, even a powerful one, doesn't solve the problem. This build leverages strengths, and not the obvious ones, instead of trying to cover that weakness.

I'm not sure AoG really changes the lightning situation much, except possibly with Wrathful Skies or Shimmering fields. And those are army killers even without a lightning vulnerability. Thugs on their own don't need AoG, Iron Will will suffice.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

A pretender who can summon spectres is definitely a boon facing mind hunting.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Don't get me wrong. I think the build is sound. Strong, if you will. However said uncovered weaknesses can be the doom of it. This build would be at a disadvantage facing a nation with similar resources/size that has inherent access to astral, death and fire/air.

With an astral pretender you get astral income and can then empower stealthy commanders with S to cover from MH (1/2 are enough to deter).
With death you get specters.
With both you get Ether clan leaders.

And, I'm not saying I have the answers for this build. I'm just challenging Baalz to come up with a brilliant solution :)

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Mindhunt I think is generally speaking not going to be a huge problem. Sure, it's not gonna be the funnest thing in the world if you go up against a nation really optimizing mind hunt spam (regardless of the nation you're playing), but if you're expecting it you can do things to compensate to a fair degree. Just one or two specters (which your pretender can fairly easily summon along with llamia queens) boosted up to S3 can teleport and are stealthy so your opponent never knows where they are or even how many you have - only that the really tempting targets tend to feeblemind his guys more often than never. Add to that swarms and swarms of black harpy decoys that he never knows how many are where - or better yet Centaur Heirophants with 15 base MR who you can stick lead shields & armor of souls on, plus MR amulets if you've lined up lizards or sages or whatever. It starts looking a lot harder to just snipe the guys you want even if they do have low MR. How many mind hunts can you really expect to drop turn after turn with no clams? I think they'll often run out of pearls before you run out of harpies even if you don't have any astral cover, and those feebleminds really start to hurt with any S cover at all. In addition, if you're going up against somebody likely to blast you with mind hunts - there's no reason at all that you can't leave most of your combat Pans untransformed, or use the ones that happened to transform into something with a decent MR (there are some). You can use domes to protect the research centers if mind hunts start poaching there and you haven't lined up any S inies at all - mind hunts aren't the type of thing that suddenly drop 20 at a time so you'll have time to respond before too much damage is done. All in all, I think that threat goes into the "pain to deal with" category rather than "OMG, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?"

As to battlefield stuff, I think you're underestimating how resilient some of these suggestions are. Wrathful Skies? Super harpies & iron bane will kill them before it bites. They add storm? Hasted centaurs go across the battlefield almost as fast, and eventually you've got fairy queens or Gaia's blessing which means their regen lets them mostly ignore the damage. Master Enslave? Oh, sorry, I'm leading a bunch of mindless dark vines and this year's fashion is all about armor of souls to boost my blood magic and lead shields as accessories. Better luck next year... The white centaurs do *only* have a 14 MR, I guess they'd be the weak spot - unless you're counting the cave drakes thrown in mostly to sucker your enemy into going with MR counter stuff. ;)

What astral specifically are you thinking is going to pose a problem?

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

It's also worth pointing out that Baalz says practically nothing about pretender design here. You want N and D is all I get from his guide. So put some S on there too and you're no worse off than any other nation with no access to Astral. That eliminates most SC pretenders, but is still doable.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Oh, sorry missed this.

Firestorm isn't gonna do squat to most of what you're fielding so long as you're dropping marble warriors instead of mass protection. You've got a bunch of high hitpoint, 20+ protection, potentially regenerating guys, firestorm just doesn't do enough damage. Plus, as I mentioned above you're guys can move *fast* and hit *hard* so your opponent better not be planning on firestorm to carry the day by itself.

Stellar cascades - you do have a harpy strat and a bunch of maenads, get swarm very early and howl a bit later, plus hopefully have lifelong protections. Stellar cascade isn't too scary when it can't be concentrated and your opponent closes appallingly fast.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Oh, yeah I totally forgot to emphasize how ridiculous Gaia's Blessing + Mass Regen fold together by the time you're really worrying about heavy lifting battlefield magic out of your opponent. With decent protection 50% resistance is often about as good as being immune to anything not armor negating...and you're regenerating the damage that is done! If wrathful skies is likely go with mass protection. If firestorm is, go with army of lead. If you're worried about both - you can switch in marble warriors. If your opponent is such a broadly diversified magic threat that that is also a bad idea - you can probably smash straight through him with just brute strength - iron bane and rush of strength of strength harpies, or hasted minotaurs, or weapons of sharpened regenerating centaurs. You've got a whole lot of flexibility.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

I was trying to get the lycanthropes amulet + flesh axe (whatever it's called) on Minotaur Lords working, but they just got ripped apart very quickly because of the tiny defence - am I doing something wrong? I only had 4-5 in each battle, but they were fighting odds I would expect most thugs to beat. This was against the AI too.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

The minotaurs lords are not general line troops, nor really thugs. They are intended to be special purpose units to take out the real elite enemy units which will chew through your other troops, not to take on waves of heavy infantry. When you've got outfitted Neifel jarls freezing your centaurs, or Lanka mistformed thugs, or...basically most anything tough enough to shrug off the rest of your lineup is when you bring these closers in. The idea is that they've got enough protection/hps/regen to make it really hard to stop them before they get a couple hits in - which is all it takes to accomplish their purpose. If you put them in a situation where you expect them to kill dozens of guys apiece you're gonna be disappointed, but if you expect them to take out the guy that none of your other units can you'll find they shine. You can field 4 or 5 of these guys for the cost of a real kitted SC so that's roughly what enemy SCs should be looking at facing.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

They should be pretty nice against anything size 3 or bigger, especially if it's relying on fear/awe/mistform.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

I just finished playing EA Pan in Mists of Time (the game was CBM 1.5, so gem-gens were still in though), and thought I'd share some of my experiences.

First off, I made heavy use of the reverse communion, as mentioned by Jarkko in page 3 of his guide - http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=43819 - and it was supremely effective. And that was without ever using Hell Power (the only time I intended to try it was in an epic attempt to storm a castle, and I had my Blood Slaves and a ton of Maenads nuked in the first round by RoSes).

All my main armies had at least 5 Pans and several Astral mages (mostly Lizard Shaman - yeah, getting those guys was key). The top 4 Pans would cast Sabbath Slave, some big Nature BE or BF, and then whatever. The last Pan (with a Blood booster if necessary) would cast Sabbath Master, Reinvigoration (and thus dramatically lower the slave-Pans' fatigue right after casting their big spells), Earth Power, Strength of Gaia, maybe another Reinvigoration or Elemental Fortitude or whatever, and Fire. And of course the last Astral mage would cast Communion Master, Power of the Spheres, whatever other buffs seemed useful (Personal Luck, Body Ethereal, etc.), and Fire.

Once the game got into the later stages, I would have at least Mass Regeneration, Relief, Gaia's Blessing, and Rush of Strength up by the second round of every major battle. To buy time, I'd also have a Troll King ready to cast Army of Lead the first round (OK, easier to do when you have many Blood Stones to buy them and boost them with, to be sure, but still doable for at least your most important army in 1.6).

Then your E2 Pans (now at least E5 with Earth Boots, E6 with Stones) are throwing down Weapons of Sharpness from round 3 on, and your Naked Ladies are now downright scary. To go with the Charm spam and whatever else you want to throw out.

And since I was fielding a lot of low encumbrance units, and had several Lamia Queens (and other assorted units) with Water, I'd often throw down things like Quagmire, Foul Vapors, Grip of Winter, etc., figuring it would all hurt the enemy a whole lot more than my own light troops, all of whom were protected at least to some degree by Pangaea's buffs. Very effective when used against the right opponent.

I also empowered a Lizard Shaman in Earth (OK, harder to do without Blood Stones, I know). One thing I had him do was forge Slave Matrices, which I passed out to the Troll Kings, Lamia Queens, Faery Queens, and such. I suppose that might be a useful strategy for any Communion/Sabbath power. But Pangaea can give slaves in such a reverse communion such an amazing number of useful buffs, it really kicks *** if you can do it, even if they're only getting a +1 magic level boost from PoS, as they also get reinvigoration from Earth Power, extra regeneration from Strength of Gaia, etc., etc.. Easier to get done in 1.5, but perhaps still doable in 1.6, and well worth it if it can be done.

But since Baalz made this guide to talk about an alternate strategy for Pangaea (going for quality over quantity), I will say that I agree with him to a certain extent, even though I had plenty of success with my hordes of chaff backed up by nasty battle magic (I went the Turmoil-3, Maenad Factory route).

I mean, I was swimming in chaff. Too much to shake a stick at. And although I also used Transformation on a huge scale (though I did lose a couple of Pans that way, and some new units were useless for anything other than lab work, my research was superb, some Foul-Spawn transforms could still wield hammers [after getting un-Feebleminded by GoH], and most could Blood Hunt quite safely), gold was still often short. And often a lot of that fodder just sat in forts for lack of a way to deploy them effectively.

Truly, I had to make do with chaff and summoned units (in fact, I never recruited a non-commander from quite early on in the game), as I needed all my gold for other stuff, and couldn't afford to buy any of Pangaea's line-troops. Luckily, I had plenty of trolls (tried to kill those guys off ASAP), drakes, wolves (once I captured the Soulstone, at least), thousands of Maenads (of course), and Foul Spawn.

Foul Spawn. That should be Pangaea's go-to free fodder, once you've got enough research. Easy to afford, once Blood Hunting gets going (so perhaps transition from recruited units to Spawn once you're able to Transform your Pans?). Generally tougher, occasionally much tougher, than Maenads, and very nasty once buffed by all that Pangaea can drop on them! Just a few Pans can summon all the meat you need with Improved Cross Breeding cast each turn, at the cost of minimal Blood Slaves. Even regular Cross Breeding might be worth it, if you've got a way to buff the fodder. And of course the rare special units can be quite outstanding.

My biggest problem with Pan in the Late Game was the lack of operational mobility. Without solid access to A or S (no Teleport or CT-ready mages), Pangaea just doesn't have that quick strike, attack anywhere, capability. But boy, they can really grind it out on the ground with anyone.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Faery trod.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Yeah, getting big armies around was no problem, as I also had Stygian Paths and Gateway available in the later stages of the game. But I got jealous seeing everyone else use Teleport and Cloud Trapeze to send out a multitude of raiders and SCs all over the place, while I had to grimly plod forward the old fashioned way ;)

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

My daughter has "Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairie Book". Is that like Fairie Trod?

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

I think that stream of life and charm should be taken in account when fighting against elite troops, thugs and SC's, also I definetly should try minotaur lords equipped like Baalz said.
Pan is an N4 mage, N5 with strength of gaia, N6 if we were able to afford nature staff for him.
If we were able to get an S1 mage, pan also can be equipped with spell focus and an eye of the void (spell eagle eyes can compensate the loss of precission). So, if we are going to face small quantities of elites or SC, we can order some chaff (30-60) to guard 1-3 pans, and order them strength of gaia - maybe eagle eyes - multiple streams of life or charm, with good penetration bonuses.

I also wonder about ways to use Pans as melee fighters. They can get regeneration with strength of gaia, many can get reinvigoration with summon earthpower, have good magic resistance. Maybe it's possible to use tangle wines or polimorf once or two times before finally ordering equipped pan to attack (being surrounded by swines he may have time to reinvigorate because swines probabably won't do much harm to animal-awe Pan).

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Thanks for the guide, I've been toying with Pangaea a lot and have been unable to make them work to my satisfaction, but something about the nation just makes me love it. I'll give it a shot!

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

No love for Demonknights?

At 5 slaves apiece they're ridiculously underpriced. And like 1/3 Pans can summon them without boosters. Fear+0 line troops are all sorts of nasty, and these guys are 22 protection cavalry with only *1* encumbrance to boot! I'd think about delaying transformation the turn or two it'll take you to pick up blood 4 reasonably early and start spamming these guys.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Wait, you mean multiple castings of Curse of Stones STACK?

Do other battlefield-wide spells stack?

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Demon knights are very cool, but you have to keep in mind the opportunity costs. Pans are awful big mages to be summoning line units one at a time. The demon knight costs a good bit more than 5 blood slaves in this case. 10 demon knights is a useful force - but it costs you 50 blood slaves...and 100 research points, plus 350 gold in Pan upkeep if you've delayed transformation to get them, plus the gold you tied up in the initial recruitment of the pans. Demon knights are indeed solid units, but in most situations they're comparable to your buffed centaurs so don't bend over too far backwards to get them.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

No, they don't stack, but it's MR easily resists (+4 to the roll), so even MR 10 guys are going to have a moderately high rate of resistance. Casting it several times will let you affect a good portion of them.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

I see, that makes sense. Hm. Does the effect scale with caster E path level at all?

That must be why I have rarely seen a battle-winning effect when I have cast it: too many enemies make their save.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

use boosters: void eye, that amulet thing, and runebreaker/smasher with Rain of Stones and it is very effective.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

of course, if you can make void eyes and runesmashers as Pan in any kind of quantity, you got really lucky with indie mages...

But even without boosters, easily resists is a +4 bonus to their MR. Checking our handy manual DRN probability table (the most useful part of the manual), we note that easily resist vs. MR10 (10 vs. 14) is an 18% chance of success. Against any reasonable army size, the Law of Large Numbers comes into play, so think of that as 18% of the enemy army affected. That's not so bad.

Now, you've got an E3 Pan sitting around who wants to cast this, slap some earth boots on and cast Summon Earth Power, and now we're at E5, which gives us +1 to penetration. Now we're up to 24% of the enemy army affected. Even against a respectable MR of 13, you're affecting 11% of the army with an E5 caster.

If you can swing runesmashers, void eyes, and spell foci, that's another 5 penetration. That's 62% of the enemy army affected against MR10. Against MR12-13 you're at 46-38% of the army affected.

Now, lets say you cast 3 of those.

E5 caster, vs. MR 10: (1-.24)^3 = ~44% unaffected, or 56% affected.
E5 caster, vs. MR 13: (1-.11)^3 = ~70% unaffected, or 30% affected.
E5 caster, +5 pen boosters, vs. MR 10: (1-.62)^3 = ~5% unaffected! (95% affected)
E5 caster, +5 pen boosters, vs. MR 13: (1-.38)^3 = ~24% unaffected, or 76% affected.

So, its going to be sensitive to enemy MR, but against MR 10-11 targets its probably worthwhile even without penetration boosters. If you can snag some penetration boosters, it's good even against decent MR. What it won't do is impede high-MR sacreds or thugs/SCs.

Re: A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6
 

Actually, the basic MR penetration strength is 12, not 10 as the manual claims. So against MR 10 troops it will be a 12 against 14 check, giving you a 30% of success; much more useful then with an 18% success-rate and making boosters even more effective.

By the way, does anyone know if the probabilities table in the manual is correct? I seem to remember someone doing some tests and claiming otherwise but can't find the thread.