"You know I'm just tryin to yank your chain."
i know.. and i'm just playin along
"Alexi lost his god and may be weak but also may not be."
well, i'll be honest, i didn't have much experience with Vans before starting this game. But I've since discovered a bunch of successful strategies in SP for Vans, and with those the painful realization that my current scales+pretender made an extremely poor combination. I don't expect to survive long without my pretender's magic since i was relying on Blade Winds and Thunder Strike early on, and then after turn 10 it was Destruction+Blade Winds. This allowed me to take out most independents with very few troops + my pretender, which was required since all my gold went towards buying mages for research to get those spells. (which also means I don't have priests to call my god back..)
The reason why my scales where wrong for this early game strategy is because I took Sloth3, which makes it really tough to recruit armies. Vanheim has terrific troops, and ignoring them was stupid of me when I built my pretender. Their mages are good, but useless in battle until mid game or later. Plus I took the Midgard theme, which limits my troop selection to Skin Shifters and Einhere (which are both excellent in combat) but without high resources, I can't recruit them fast enough to build armies. Plus, with that theme you lose access to the best Van commanders outside your capital. So I would have been crippled by mid game anyways without the capacity to make armies and I would have had to use mostly Galdermans, which require equipment or alot of luck to get the right magics. I'd be interested in hearing about any other strategies for Midguard. My intuition is that Midguard is all about killer Skin Shifters+Einhere armies supported by a few Galdermans.
With this in mind, Panther is welcome try to take me, but my grieving nation is not gonna go down without a fight.