The Wyrm... The one pretender capable of wiping out the neighbouring land independents and then continuing into the sea. With two Horror Helmets (they augment each other) and some cheap miscellaneous protection (2xBracers will do), it can eat its way through just about anything, though it is recommended to look more towards the
number of enemies than their quality. Like all SCs, it can get swamped.
The 0 point Manticore: Hold and attack rear on your pretender does not get better than this. Deserves a bracer or two, though.
My favourite, however, is the 0 point Nataraja for the nations can get it (Arcos, Tien Chi, ?) as they typically have very good support mages capable of forging a wide range of items and site searching:
- It allows you awesome scales
- In the early game, with a few cheap artifacts to boost defense, it is a great early SC, and, if it dies - so what? It has no magic to lose, and you can call it back in your own time.
- You can even load it down with armour, helmet, and four shields, and use it as a shock absorber if you favour missile troops. Monstrous defense and protection on the front rank. Hit me!
- In the mid-game, you can empower it using some of the many gems from the sites you have found with your site-searchers. You do not need to empower it ALL that high to be able to use nearly all magic, as, unlike all other pretenders...
- It can dual-wield Staves of the Elements, for a +2 bonus to all elemental magic (I prefer one of each sort, to get both the elemental resistances AND the high basic protection from earth
), and with resistances and protection covered, all the other slots can be dedicated to even more magic boosts or regeneration/reinvigoration &etc, which means
- ...That the mid-game Nataraja equpped with mid-game items has the magical firepower and verstatility of just about any rainbow pretender, while having 7-8 times their hitpoints (and size )
An awesome combination, but it does rely on having good site-searches in the early-to-mid game to build up a decent supply of gems.
Still, once you get going, the versatility in being able to equip either two Staves of the Elements OR any four combinations of weapons/shields that you desire, allows you to customize the Nataraja to fight any threat on the fly. It only has one miscellaneous slot, but the two extra hands more than makes up for that lack, given the wide range of modifiers found on weapons and shields.