[Taqwus]

For instance... if you don't go with a scalemonster build, you might use a bless build, combat pretender, or rainbow mage... or maybe a caster. They're useful for different purposes.

A bless pretender is designed primarily to take particular paths of magic to enhance sacred units. As such, the pretender himself might be dormant or even possibly imprisoned if taking a particularly monstrously expensive bless. This tends to get used with either powerful sacred units (helhirdings, Niefel giants come to mind) or ones that can be cranked out in decent numbers and moved reasonably quickly (flagellants, valkyries). There are nations for which this is likely grossly suboptimal; LA Man on a large map comes to mind, considering that rangers and wardens are capital-only, fairly resource-intensive, and strat-move 1. There are nations where bless strategies make an awful lot of sense; Niefelheim or Helheim on a small map, for instance.

A combat pretender is designed to facilitate rapid expansion by slaughtering enemies quickly. As such, they may take some paths of magic specifically for some boosting spells (earth magic for protection, nature for regeneration, astral for luck and etherealness -- but beware taking -low- astral). They may take a 9- or 10- dominion for the Awe effect; if the pretender already starts with Awe or Fear, the combined effect will be quite nasty against living melee troops. Recuperation, regeneration, item slots, lots of hit points and att/def, and damage shields (Gorgon's petrification, for instance) help here. Rapid expansion can really help, so if your national troops are weak (say, you're a summons-heavy nation) then a combat pretender is one obvious way to help -- mercenaries are another, but you might have to bid fairly high...

A well-designed combat pretender can be pretty vicious, although less so than in Dominions 2 with larger armies and some nastier anti-supercombatant effects.


A rainbow mage is designed with a number of low-level paths and typically gets tasked with bootstrapping the search for magic sites. Once there's enough research and income to permit searching via remote-search spells, they can still do some searching, are fairly versatile item forgers, and the amount of magic makes them decent researchers.


It's also possible to design a pretender for a specific difficult spell; this is more of a late large game thing. If you're the Ashen Empire and you really, really intend to be destroying the global economy with Utterdark, taking a high-Death pretender will make it easier. If you're playing a blood-heavy nation and plan to be pushing for Astral Corruption, you'll want somebody with both high Astral and high Blood, and this is easiest to do if you have a pretender designed for it.


In a small and short game, less research will be done and you'll find bless strategies and order/death/misfortune scales more rewarding; production may or may not be important depending on your nation. You won't necessarily need *numbers* though if your blessing strongly improves already powerful units. Try Helheim Helhirdings with F9W9 blessing, for instance, mixed with Dis/Valkyrie flying squads.