ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Hi!

Im quite new to the game, but have read a great many posts in these forums and played many SP games. And only 5 MPs so far (all of them 2 vs 2 in small (35ish) maps).

I have just played vs one of my friends on a 40 province map, EA pangaea vs his tienchi. i tried to overwhelm him with maenads and built only pans (and bought most of the mercs). I had gained the upper hand as for quite long there were no battles between us except the ones with my mercenaries. Then came the time when I deployed my maenads with pans busy casting wooden warriors and swarm (I was rushing with my research with great sage (knowing that there is hardly any time in such a small map)). He followed his usual strategy this time too: took good scales for strong economy and amassed archers and the tower-shielded infantry (and as many mages and priests as possible, with quite little research). Experienced players surely know now that my army - although superior in numbers - barely could even inflict any casualties when our main forces met. His victory was so obvious to me that after a couple more battles i gave up.

1) any general ideas to counter this above strat? I know its coming if he plays tienchi)

2) I can come up with different strategies with pangaea, but would like to give maenads some more tries. Any ideas how can i improve my chances? I guess im missing on something (probably not even a few things but many).

There is little time to research other things, this time i managed alter5 and conjur3 (for summon EP).

When the decisive battle began i was having more provinces, equal income (with turmoil vs his order) and 3 castles vs his 2.
Pans are expensive, so i barely had money for anything else.

3) One more: he always builds only very few extra castles and always on big farmland. Even sometimes near my main army: he comes (with his main army), conquers the farmland, buys a big PD and waits 5 turns (sometimes conquering neighboring provinces. Attacking him is suicidal because the high PD and the possibility of him not moving)If its suboptimal strategy how can i take advantage of it?

thanks for all the answers.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Make lots of minotaurs. They can trample his infantry troops. Also, summon animals is good a good way to get a lot of troops early on.

Or, if you want to build pans, build a lab or two and make as many pans as you can, and research charm as quickly as you can. Then you can charm all of his troops.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

What age.

It sounds as if you are talking middle or late age, due to the heavy use of pd.

You haven't mention if this was CBM or not.

My gut instinct is that you have no chance. Its like attacking fire elementals with paper mache golems.

This is sort of judo - he relies on pd to destroy your army. On top of that you are already gold hindered due to the enomous cost of your pans.

I would consider building mannikin SC's. Easier under cbm, but still possible in vanilla. Gift of reason and then equip.
Enchantment and constuction become goto schools.

Dryads interspersed with your scs can help with your mannikin boosting spells.....

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

With a bit of Construction, Pan, Dryads or Minotaur Lords can make good thugs.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Pans are great thugs - summon earthpower, ironskin/invulnerability, personal regen - snake bladder stick/ a brand, vine shield, black plate, boots of messenger

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Watch out for Invulnerability & Snake bladder.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Unless you put resist poison in the mix as well. Iron pigs are nice in CBM - 10 pigs for 4 gems and Pans can cast them without boosters.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Pan aren't natively poison resistant are they? If not, with resist poison and invulnerability, they'll still be taking damage. Use Ironskin instead.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

In my opinion you need to plan your pretender for this. Examples:
1) A Bull with E4 and N2 (one of the skins, personal regeneration, resist elements, attack rear) together with minotaurs will trample through TC troops
2) Carrion Woods caster. Mix maenads and manikin after you get Carrion Woods up, with centaurs on the flank. Manikin stun the TC troops, maenads rip the stunned targets apart, while berserking centaurs make it impossible for TC to flank them. If you have time to research Mass Protection (or have several Pans casting Wooden Warriors) the mixed manikin-maenad will be a nighthmare for TC to handle (and you'll have lots and lots of those, you should accept and expect 10 to 1 losses) because the army simply won't rout (undead don't rout, and maenads will pracctically autoberserk when they are mixed to same units with manikin).

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

another option is to ditch the mass maenads idea and go for neutral order/turmoil and focus more on Dryads than Pans in the early game. you won't get as many maenads, but than again TC is fielding mass archers against you... instead you can afford your more expensive troops, be it centaurs(archers+warriors) or minotaurs. both of them are very good against TC's infantry forces. put some centaur warriors at the front with hold and attack orders(they have shields and high hp, so they can catch arrow fire just fine) than put some centaur archers behind them to take out TC's archers and the trampling minotaurs on the flanks on attack rear so they trample through TC's forces.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

many thanks for the ideas guys!

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

btw we play in vanilla, so cw is not an option, and - if cbm is any indication - my troops are still quite expensive. I tried thugging with pans: ironskin, blessing of gaia, summon EP, and snake bladder, vine shield, regen. ring, snake ring, balck steel amror and helmet, boots of messenger. they were quite succesful vs armies 20-30ish in numbers (this whole experiment was in SP), but in every battle with at least 40 soldiers they got hit with 28 hp by a single strike (from something like a spear). I know critical strikes exist but i thought they just halve protection.
so how is it possible?

Is there an economical way to make them even better thugs, or thats all i can expect from a (pan) thug, and use them in pairs vs greater armies? i also wonder if those 30 gems and 320 gold could be spent more efficiently, for instance 1 nature gem can be converted into 1 vine ogre with ivy crown, thats about 30 ogres, and not counting the gold.

Do i think correctly that when planning melee thugs it pays to sacrifice the high defense in favor of great protection?

thanks

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Probably you have fatigue issues due to heavy (black steel) armor. If you have ironskin or invul, try to use lighter armor (hydra skin seems the best, or perhaps rainbow if you can forge it), use boots of messenger. Your total reinvigoration (with 4 from EP) should be at least 1 more than melee encumbrance, that way you'll be able to avoid crits after initial fatigue dissolves (scripting couple of hold orders after buffs helps here).

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

You want your pan to enter the combat with fatigue as closer to 0 as possible. Try putting him to the far back, change summon EP to the first place in script, put hold x 2 at the end before attacking. If he still has too much fatigue when entering combat, try a different combination of armor, spells or more reinvig items (girdle of might).

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

This sounds like a recipe for fatiguing out and getting killed horribly, to be honest.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

In vanilla yes, in CBM no.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Pangaea is just so bad. And boring. There national summons require death, which you cant get on your national casters unless its late era. The Centaur Archers cost so much gold and arent sacred and their speed if of no use since they meant to use their bows. Satyrs suck. Minotaurs are hard to come by and even though they are powerful, they cost much.

What works good for me is to mass pans and use lord of the wild (attracts manaeds) and just swarm the enemy with hordes (you can easily get 150 or 200) maenads. Unfortunally there is no AoE buff available unless you get to the E3 (unlikely without a E pretender).
You can easily buy Turmoil 3 since you dont need ressources that badly, which will greatly increase the amounts of maenads you receive per turn. Then you can use the points you gained to power up your Lord of the Wild even more and/or buy Growth 3 to get the supplies needed.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

What you've outlined above doesn't make too much sense. The lord of the wild doesn't give you anything that you don't already have with your national mages. You will already have hundreds or thousands of maenads if you take turmoil three, so you really don't need a few more of them with your pretender. Nor do you need to worry about feeding them, since they will be surrounded by nature mages and aren't valuable enough to care whether they are diseased. Take growth because it synergizes with carrion woods, and gives you more gold income, not because you want to feed throwaway troops.

One half of your pans will have E2, which means that one half of them will have E3 in battle. Sloth makes sense, turmoil or a neutral order scale makes sense. Getting a lord of the wild who is completely redundant does not.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

also it's not that hard to get death mages rolling, all you need is some death on your pretender for specters, mount fiends, liches, etc. if you combine some water on your pretender than you can use streams of hades and that other spell that gives you W3D3 mages. the problem would be to combine death with nature on the same mage, but with so many nature gems you should have, affording a few empowerments won't be too hard, and pretty good for what you'll get if you choose to focus on the carrion path...

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

MA Pans have a 1/4 chance of getting D1, and a very long-odds chance of D2.

And a lot of players find Pangaea to be one of the more interesting nations due to all the different strategies available. You can go for Maenad hordes, Minotaur tramplers, dual blessed sacreds, Pan Thugs, heavy stealthy, annoyance with Satyr Sneaks/Revelers and Venom Charm carrying Harpy's, undead hordes via Carrions. Plus several others I've probably missed out from this quick hit list.

Out of all the nations in the game, Pan are probably just about the most interesting due to their variety. So if you find them boring, you either haven't discovered all the tricks they are capable of yet, or perhaps you've just not learnt to appreciate them. There are several nations in Dominions that can play a bit boring and repetitive on times, but Pan certainly isn't one of them.

Also I'd expect Gandalf or Jarkko to come along soon and defend this attack on their favourite nation

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Pan sucks.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

So, from the sounds of things, he's moving around with a single big army, and camping somewhere occasionally to build forts? Lol.

Ok, its obvious that a head-on fight is unwinnable. So don't fight his army. At all. Avoid it. Take all his other provinces from him. Push for his capital and siege it. Let him chase you around the map. Push a research advantage fueled by the gold advantage this gives you.

If he sieges one of your forts, so what? Your maenad-generating pans make your forts unbreakable - let him sit out there while you keep researching. He's just wasting his time with his army. And of course your other forts are still producing mages and armies of maenads to go plunder his lands while his army is occupied.

At some point he's forced to either break up his mega-army or hemorrhage cash and thus troops like mad as his income plummets.

Basically, when confronted with a large monolithic army, raid the hell out of him.

----------

Eventually you research some useful remote attack spells. Spells which single out commanders can help break his army up, and spells which attack his troops can whittle down his numbers. The best for you is probably Beckoning because its a nature spell (in thaumaturgy) for which you'll have plenty of gems and casters, and its on the way to Charm, which you'll want anyway.

Also, use summons. You should be able to Dragonmaster some Pan and mass Cave Drakes (although this is harder in vanilla because dragonmaster is punitively hard to research), which should absorb archer fire reasonably well. Ivy King thugs, troll kings with retinue, kithraonic lions, fall bears, and eventually Faerie Queens can probably all find a role in your armies, with paths you have easy access to.

I'd strongly consider breaking into one of death or blood (if your a Pan era that has plenty of blood access, do that) to add some variety to your options.

Tactical: Use archer decoys! Put some troops with shields up front with orders to guard a commander in the back, watch his archers run into your hordes of screaming women while trying to fire at the withdrawing troops.

When you manage Faerie Queens, make arrow fend routine.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Pan is not bad for sure :)

Pan has lots of options available. It is the options which makes it difficult to me. Basically you have to decide before the game which way you want to go, and then have to stick to that. If you try to change tracks in the middle of the game, you crash.

Plan your pretender along the lines you intend to play.

You want Pan thugs to rule the game? Design your pretender so that he can craft the gear, also it might make sense to have Order scales (for increased income, because those Pans cost a ton).

EA Pans don't have deathmages, so what? If you want to get carrion critters, give your pretender D2 and you get all the carrion critters you want, first summon a Revenant and empower him to N1 -> Carrion Centaurs and Carrion Ladies all over the place. Or better yet (in CBM before 1.6), take D6N5 on your pretender and get Carrion Woods rolling on turn 10 (not possible in vanilla or CBM 1.6).

You want to have sneakers all over the place? Go for it. Get A3 on your pretender, and craft Flying carpets for Harpies who can then take 7 revellers along; two such squads will eat any PD20 or less just like that. Meawhile have your centaurs sneak in the regular way. Call of the Wild on first turn of war with all your pans. If War opens up with you taking 20+ areas on turn one, it will be very intimidating (and it will be something you can pull off during the second year of the game).

Or go with minotaurs and centaurs in a more traditonal warfare. Focus on Alteration, buff your armies to all new levels. Again, you have to plan for this, and get for your pretender the paths you need.

Or (in EA) go with a Dom10 SC pretender at start (the White or Black Bull being the obvious choice in CBM), and blood sac everywhere, with dryads rush-building temples. It is evil if you can dominion kill your closest neighbour during first year, but quite doable with Pangaea. If we are not talking of very big maps, it is quite easy to even get critical mass with your dominion rather fast, and the dominion roll becomes unstoppable. You thought LA Ermor dominion roll was evil? Hah! EA Pan with blood saccing, stealthy H2 preachers and temples costing just 200 gold is *evil* if you plan for the dominion kill.


If you don't have a plan, then I agree Pangaea will suck. It is easy to fail with Pangaea because it can be so easy to get lost amongst all the options. Make a plan and stick to it, that is my advice :)

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Well its definitly funny how ppl have different opinions. I dislike pangaea because they basicly stay the same throughout all eras. They dont get different units, they just lose some earth/nature and get a bit of death in later eras, of course they get heavier armor as well, like all nations. Flavourwise, the white/black centaur/dryad theme is a decent idea, though they still feel the same to me, there should be 3-4 REALLY new units over the different eras instead of only black/white and death-pan.
All their national summons require death, so early era you are really disavantaged because you dont have natural death at all.

I most dislike the fact that they use cavalry (i.e. units that move fast and have good hp) for archers, because it seems like a waste to have "melee" stats on a longbow-archer.


What i enjoy about them is really maenad-hording, using a couple of pans with turmoil its really easy to get huge mobs of maenads. Decent AoE buffs would be cool though.


About the Lord of the Wild: I basicly always play with nation-specific pretenders who fit the theme because flavour is kind of important to me :D You are probably right in that the Lord is a bad choice. Last game i had a N/B 8 lord of the wild but unfortunally blessing is kind of stupid if you only have the white centaurs to bless.


EDIT: yes, Dryads stealths and temple cost is a big plus, agreed.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Dryad hoplites is perhaps the best heavy infantry in the game. Excellent stats, good gear, Awe+2, sacred, they really truly are excellent babes.

Revellers are bloody marvelous, but for totally different reasons from dryad hoplites. Suprisingly revellers and dryad hoplites are not available in same eras, one would almost to like to believe there is a reason :p

Centaur archers worthless? Well, I never recruited them true, but oh boy do I love them in PD's :) Longbow with good accuracy, and when/if the enemy gets through to them (or they go out of ammo), they just go into town with melee with damn good stats (and they get there fast, having cavalry speed and all that).

For me EA Pans are a clear Turmoil3/Luck3 nation, while LA requires Order scales. MA Pans have to choose either way, and plays differently based on the Order scale you took (with Order you get more of the heavy armoured troops, but with Turmoil you get all those nice&free maeanad.... decissions decissions; usually I take something like Turmoil 1 in an attempt to get the best of both :p).

EA Pangaea is the only one with blood-saccing, and that makes them totally unique from the other era Pans.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

And a lot find them boooooring. Me included.

Monotony of the spell casters - ie, few choices, little variability. The national paths give you a rocky road on summoning. Monotony of heros. And without bloodstones, whats your endgame: almost purely defined by your pretender, ie, less interesting than many other nations.

As for the plethora of strategies: who cares how many bad strategies a nation has? Stealth <<< Military might. Magic carpets for harpies? Are you kidding? building a strategy around air, based on a pretender and/or getting obscuro?

Pangeae usually devolves into micromanagement hell: ferrying massive amounts of maenids to their deaths. And wondering if you'll be able to build any units next turn, due to the huge upkeep on your pans.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As for the OP's comment about thugs: Man you are overspending on your thugs WAY too much.

you want more units of lower quality - which is the general pan approach to everything.

definitely do not waste gems on armor. your target should be 5-15 gems per thug.

Items I would consider: Vinesheilds, snakebladder, firebrand, snake rings....

So for example: V = vineshields, F = firebrands

V
F
V
F
V


Cast the usual summon earthpower, invulnerability, attack. Or alternately give them all snakebladders, cast iron, and have some way of dealing with poison.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Pangaea has access to air magic (Faerie queens, the Harpy Queen) other than pretender too, although if you want to have magic carpets fast, you'll want air on your pretender. It is not a mass strategy, but crafting even four carpets will give you two-four kick *** stealthy flying raiding forces (7 revellers can take any below 10 PD (and probably without any losses too), while 14 is enough to take a PD 20). The problem of the sneaking armies is the low mobility, so adding a few with high mobility takes the stealth strategy to all new levels; your opponent knows the sneaking centaurs will hit neighbouring provinces or disappear from sight, but where will those flying sneakers go?

Claiming stealth is much less useful than pure military power is rather short-sighted: When your opponent lose most of their provinces on turn one of a war, what will their big kick-*** army do? Take back one province at a time, or split up the army? If you split up, the evil sneakers can form up and fight as a big army, if you stick to one army only, you'll run out of provinces pretty fast. If you go with the stealth strategy, you don't go hitting your head against their sledgehammer, but you should focus on kicking them where it hurts most.

If you dont build your pretender to be part of your strategy as Pangaea, then you will indeed suck. You can't do all the things you could with Pangaea, you have to choose which way you want to go, and go for that all the way. Yes, it may be boring for people who like to switch strategies mid-game, as that just doesn't work with Pangaea; you have to choose what you intend to do *before* the game.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Faerie queens are conjuration 8. Pan is usually low on the research charts. and access that late in the game counts as no access - especially as you have a lot of other paths crying for earlier exploitation. Enchantment, home of most of the Pan national spells, for example.

I don't agree that 7 revellers will beat any pd.
But even if that were true, the cost to station a decent garrison is *way* less than your cost to build a decent raider.

And, even if it *were* true, 1 arrow of seeking will generally kill said harpy, costing you your carpet. Send 2 if you want to be sure. Most nations will have *far* better access to air than pan will, again since you will be relying on your pretender to find it.

You're far better off just building forts on the border - preferably in forest.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Don't Seeking arrows ignore sneakers?

They're stealth raiders. The cost to station *a* decent garrison is way less, but the cost to station decent garrisons everywhere is high.

Not that I think it's a tactic to build a game around, but it's not that bad. Of course, if you're building the carpet anyway there's no need to put it on a flying unit. How about 6 revelers and a dryad?

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

I (as EA Pangaea) used against chrispedersens Tien Chi (in the Magellan game) a Dryad with decent equipment (including flying boots) and a flying carpet to carry along 7 revellers. I had previously tried with a dryad and 6 revellers against Marverni PD, and I lost that force, so I decided to slap on flying boots too. With revellers I was able to kill even a TC PD which had a mage helping the PD, deep inside Mictlan lands (never quite figured how there could be TC province so deep inside Mictlan lands, but I found it and I was able to sneaky fly in there in two turns through the Mictlan lands). Later on 1 Harpy with carpet + 7 revellers proved to be just what the doctor did order to take out Mictlan PD (although that experiment stopped too soon, as flying became impossible with eternal storm going on for I don't how many turns).

I hadn't planned for flying sneakers in that game, but as Arcopythera happened to join me in the game, so it became rather natural. Flying sneakers + conventional sneakers + gazillions of manikin+maenads proved to be very nice in that game :p

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Yeah, I wouldn't design a pretender to do it, but if you're running Turmoil, you'll also have Luck which means you got a decent chance of getting Air from the Harpy queen. This is one thing to do with it.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Sure jarkko.. but you left out the part where I was already at war with 2 neighbors....

Almost anything wins in those circumstances... I'll be happy to go 1:1 with you EA-Mictlan vs Pan.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Turmoil 3, Sloth 3, Dom 9/10 Gorgon, find his capital and sit on it.

Is that way too crazy to work?

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Ah right, I keep on forgetting you claimed to be at war with Marverni too, rather than trying to claim the spoils of war after Pangaea had done all the fighting and conquering, and that you thought you could instead go and declare war on Fomoria and rely on bullying me off of my conquests ;)

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

LOL.. that was two people.. PLUS marverni. who I attacked way before you did...
like I said.. anytime= )

Jeff: even with turmoil 3, with 4 national heros you still only have a 1.5% chance per turn of getting the harpy. Not exactly something worth planning a build around.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

I play a nation with 4 national heroes with luck 3 in one of multiplayer games on llama, turn 39. Luck 3. No heroes yet. At all. In one of games when I tested misfortune 3, I've got a hero first or second turn.So the word "strategy" is not really applicable when you rely on luck.

P.S. Oh..I forgot.3 turns ago I've got my hero.Harpy,in one of cities. But order 3 and my nation is hinnom.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

It should be impossible to get a hero if you have misfortune - or at least that's the impression I had seeing the (3% base chance + luck scale) formula governing your chance to get a hero per turn.

Haven't really tried misfortune 3 much though, due to conventional wisdom of the crippling events that are enabled at that scale, but I have certainly not seen a hero for the tries where I had misfortune 3.

Anyone got any deeper knowledge/wisdom to share on this issue?

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

With neutral luck scales, the chance of getting a hero is 3% per turn. It then changes plus or minus 1% depending on your luck/misfortune scale. So....

Luck3 - 6%
Luck2 - 5%
Luck1 - 4%
Neutral - 3%
Misfortune1 - 2%
Misfortune2 - 1%
Misfortune3 - 0%


You must have been testing a different Luck/Misfortune scale than Misfortune3, since as Redeyes says, you can not get any national heroes with a Misfortune3 scale.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

I am sorry if my post was a bit confusing - the number "3" fell off Misfortune in the first sentence of the first paragraph.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

That's was misfortune 3, and I was quite surprised as well, as I know this formula. I can't guarantee, as I don't have this save, so I can't tripple check. But still maybe there is a cap which doen'st give you zero chance. And I've got him 1st or 2nd turn.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Could it be based on current scales in the capital, not the actual scales you purchased?

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

no, he's probably talking about those Hinnom/Gath special heroes that don't share the national hero mechanism. the luck/misf for hero chances only works for national heroes, not multi heroes and other special types.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Multi-heroes should work the same way as regular heroes.
Hinnom may have some event based ones?

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

There's an event that can give you Ditan, according to Edi's list.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Seems plausible as:

Means that capital could have misfortune 0, 1 or 2.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

How so? The capital always begins with your starting scales and the only scale that is ever really likely to wary is the heat one.

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Uh, I was just about to prove you wrong with screenshots, but then I noticed that you are exactly right. Dominion starts from 1 candle, scales from max.

Nevermind.

Ninja-not-really-an-edit: Random event could change luck scale?

Re: ea pangaea vs tienchi
 

Yes, such as the baleful star which increases misfortune.