[Boron]

A Pan Strategy i have been fantasized about, but never used successfully so far in MP (iirc i have never played Pan in a Longterm MP at all because always when i wanted to try them i was already in too many games and when a new MP started i rather tried another nation then with another strat ...):

Pan: Carrion Doom

Keyspells: Haunted forest and creeping doom/swarm

Dominion is very important for this spell too.
If you buy lots of PD in your provinces, because of the manikins you get your provinces are much harder to raid.

IF you manage to spread your dominion into enemy territory too, and with the help of dryads stealth preaching this should be somehow possible, you could then use Pans and Dryads offensively who cast creeping doom and swarm.

Those manikin hordes are then a big problem for many enemy strats. The sleepvines can be even dangerous for SCs.

And because most of your stuff is stealthy you can combine this with your usual stealth strats too.

You could also try to massproduce Harpies.


Main Problem: DISPEL

Astral gems are unfortunately easier to get than nature gems. And there are other promising globals, mainly GoH and Gift of Nature's Bounty, and the ants+dragonflies need lots of nature gems too.

But hoarding is harder in Dom3, and you could get lots of extra nature gems via trading and via rushing to mother oak.

So my casting idea for haunted forest would be to cast the first haunted forest with a really high, but weird number of gems, like 583 extra nature gems.
Such an unorthodox number makes your opponents likely waste lots of pearls i think.
How would you try to dispel such a haunted forest?
Eventually it will get dispelled nontheless probably, but you can try to fool your opponents then by recasting haunted forest, sometimes with no extra gems, sometimes with like 2xx extra gems. This way they likely waste many more pearls for dispelling than usually.

If you only use nature gems for searching but save up all of them otherwise i think we can assume that we would get about 15 nature gems per turn from turn 20 on at least usually.
Till turn 20 you can at least save 100 nature gems too i think.
So at turn 60 you would then theoretically have at least 100+40x15=700 nature gems.

The 3 main questions are then:
1. How much did this slow down your progress till turn 60 if you would have used the nature gems for short-term gain investments like Ivy King Vine Ogre factories, Lamia Queens, Faery Queens, Firbolgs, Carrions etc. etc.?
2. Would you probably profit even more if you decided to save up your nature gems by casting GoH instead?
3. How many astral gems will your opponents have around turn 60? And how soon will they be able to dispel?

They might have used their astral income for short term investments, and thus have to save up for dispelling. But there might also have been someone who hoarded or has arcane nexus running.

So what do you think? Is it worth to try to include trying to "abuse" haunted forest in a pan strat?