Hello folks !
Pangea was what I played almost exclusivly in DOM1, and I was little bit frustrated that the demo deprived me of testing my beloved berserkers in DOM2. Preordered anyway, and after a short detour with Spring&Autumn T.C. I'm now back to the woods. And as I feel a strong urge to share some of my findings, here we go ... .
At first, let's have a look at the new and old(standard) themes:
New Era
Heavy steel-clad Infantry, good archers, lousy priests(2), only one mage command which is good, but certainly not overpowered.
Depends on order/productivity/high admin castle to build the troops, needs rainbow pretender to get indy mages and decent gem income, few points left for magic scale, might in fact work better with drain.
You've seen this before you say? Yeah, that's why I call it
Ulmagea !
nuff said...
Carrion Woods
They allied with a vengeful dark god to avenge the slaughter and destruction man brought to the woods. Now unholy vines are reanimating the corpses of the dead ...
.. that's the story so far. What I can't understand is that instead of bringing back the slain pangeans to hand man to death, the wood creatures chose the way of collective suicide:
CaWo has a destructive dominion that strong, that you'll lose about 500 people in your home province each turn even with growth+3 !
Looks to me like you can't expand fast enough to "survive" 'til midgame - this has been mentioned in some other thread before.
It is an interesting theme (to me), but it would be even better (playable) if it wasn't the "everything is doomed"-thing (as ermor) but some dark'n'bloody nature ... blood- and death-magic, unholy vines, blood vines (haven't I seen them elsewhere before?) and strong growth rate. Why not go the whole way and make turmoil-3, sloth-3, growth-3 mandatory and maybe tweak the death dominion down so much that it negates the growth-0/growth-1 dominions of the human neighbours, but leaves some growth for the pangeans .. could be quite nasty I think.
After all, natures decided it's time to bring death to man so others can grow again - as nature is great in forming new life from rotting corpses.
Thinking about it, the rather boring mother-pretender could get a nice twist with this theme .. some death/blood magic and a
slightly altered pic
standard theme
Despite pangea was never thought about as one of the strongest nations, it looks to me like it has been toned down even more: The heavy inf has 2 less protection now, but cost ~20% ressources more (as they're using bronce cuirasses) and may also have more encumbrance, but I'll unshure here (will check again). Free maenads are berserker-(1) only, so most times they won't hit anything or do any damage now, but are most easily mowed down.
A new berseking Sartyr has been added, but it has very limited use - it's shield- and armorless and dies to anything that comes it's way as the standard militia.
This seems not to be a big deal, but these troops are the those you'll build in the beginning, so losing more of them will hamper exansion significantly.
It doesn't really help that the Pan is one of the best starting mages in the game now with Earth-2, Nature-3 and a random pic which could you get -3/-4 with some luck - you can only get one with a cost of 350 for quite some time ... .
I'll try a standard theme and report from time to time;
Pangea
Gold Naga
Fire -4 Water -4
Death -4
Turmoil-3 Sloth -3
Growth +3 Luck +3
Magic +1
Dom.strength 5
40 Admin castle (80pts)
Maybe it's not optimised, but the pretender is a little bit more durable than the norm, it's paths cover those pangea doesn't have, the expensive pan is producing the max of maenads, maigc will speed up the rather bad research and the high admin castle will make bulding the high-ressource-units possible.
I'm not shure about the castle,though. Could be that the indy troops are in fact better than the pangean counterparts, so using a cheapo tower and bulding indies all over the place would make more sense.
See you soon, and maybe I have something more to tell you about troop choices ...
A.
EDITED: spelling, again and again. pardon me, I'm working on it, but I'm not a native speaker...
[ November 26, 2003, 11:58: Message edited by: Arralen ]