[alexti]

In the early game Pangaea has a very good unit - centaur warrior and the expansion phase will mostly rely on centaur warriors and pretender. The major Pangaea weakness is poor research and lack of offensive magic. To compensate for that I would suggest magic+2 which will make a passable researcher from dryad (5p for 110 gold and you're getting level-3 priests with it). Pans are very expensive and they will take most of your income, so it's better to rely on summons later. I usually mix lamias for survivability, Vine Ogres for a meat shield and various (weak and strong) undead. This is in line with poor research, because you only need conjuration and construction to setup good summon production. Ivy Kings and Lamia Queens are optimal for nature chain-summons. Lamia Queens will also give you an access to death magic and astral magic. Later on you can summon few demiliches to do your further undead summoning.

I wouldn't rely on maenads, because in MP most will be playing order, and you would like to have order in your empire too, because of your costly mages. Hoplites are decent troops, but they're slow and their time of usability is quite short. Plus they cost upkeep. Same applies to armored minotaurs. So I would sacrifice productivity and take sloth-3.

So the scales come to Order+3/Prod-3/Luck-2/Magic+2. To further increase income and somewhat compensate for poor productivity I'd take castle.

This leaves plenty of points to build a pretender. There're 2 goals here: cover missing magic paths and create good SC to help early expansion. The good choice here is infamous vampire queen. Something like fire-2,air-3,water-2,earth-1,death-3,blood-3. This will give you good indy conquerer with alteration-3, "almost" rainbow mage for site searching, plus an item forger.

I wasn't taking infamous VQ myself, trying to find some other good pretender, but whatever I've tried, VQ would be better. Even if you don't want to take VQ, pretender should probably be build along those lines.