[HJ]

From my (limited) experience:
If you take strong turmoil (3), you'll be getting more maenads by the midgame than you can spend or effectively ship to the front with just 5-6 pans in the capitol. The question is wheter you'll survive until then, but if you do, you'll have to recruit a hierophant every turn just to get them out of there, and have an ever-flowing stream of reinforcements.
Centaurs and regular minotaurs can make a short work of any regular army, but it's essential that you have something to soak up the arrows and inital shock, and maenads are good for this since they are free, abundant and don't rout easily regardless of high casualties. Another alternative would be revelers, which are cheap and still won't rout easily, and which you'll be able to afford quite a lot if you take order - forget about regular satyrs if you don't want to pick them up in the neighbouring provinces after each battle.
I have had good results with using fire 9 blessing with white centaurs, due to their speed and overall high stats. This means that they will be able to reach the back lines quickly and make a short work of anything that's there. Even if they do get hit, which is not too likely (high def, prot, mr for a recruitable unit, particulary of such speed), they'll go berserk and get the job done.
Since I almost exclusively played regular Pangaea with high turmoil, the armored troops (cataphracts, hoplites, war minos) didn't fit in well, so I have nothing too good to say about them. If you want to play with them, however, my suggestion would be to take New Era instead of the default anyway.
You can also try sneaky tactics with your whole armies, but maenads that make the bulk of my armies cannot sneak, so I generally didn't employ sneaking much. If you go with reveler option, however, this is more viable, as you'll have armies composed of recruited stealthy units for raiding - even serious raiding if you manage to sneak in with centaurs.
Another cool thing with Pangaea are the hierophants. They are cheap, able commanders and priests to boot, have good precision, and if you hit a pan with random in air or indie mages with air, give them longbows of accuracy for some added fun.
Blood and crossbreeding are useful at the beginning, since you'll probably take luck if you took turmoil (and this is not nearly as bad as it used to be), but blood hunting is expensive for Pangaea, the cost of Pandemoniacs being a bit prohibitive.
And, as a Last note, be weary of the fire-using nations, since the 6th spell your pans and dryads are going to cast will alomst invariably be protection or mass protection. Minotaurs make lovely torches after that.

Cheers,

[ June 01, 2004, 01:24: Message edited by: HJ ]