[kasnavada]

Turmoil is worth it, even more so for pangaea than others.

First of all, you will miss the large amount of maenads. You obviously underestimate them. Yes, they get beaten fast by units with high protection / defence and arrows, but with spells to protect from arrows, they litterally tear any low protection-unit with their bare hands with they do get in range. Furthermore, they work really well with the battlefield-wide spells like mass protection and growing fury that your pans are naturally able to cast.

When a few pans generate 60 - 80 (an army) every few months, you don't need to buy arrow catchers, enabling you to cut down on something that crucial for pangaea : maintenance costs. More money ? good, but if you need it to buy even more of the really expensive few good troops that can make a difference, you'll spend it in maintenance... But then, you'll be playing pangaea like ulm : forgetting that most of those good troops are stealthy. Being stealthy, you don't need those troops in large number, you need them to be strong enough to beat up PD, lone mages, and the commanders that (try to) bring reinforcements to your main opponent armies.

Yes, the point of maenads isn't to be the frontal attack unit. They are meant to be a distraction while your other units do the work. A way to make your opponent(s) believe your strength in number is much more than it seems. And thankfully, they make a wonderful distraction, since they are powerful, in their own way. Also, since they are not mindless, it means that as long as there is pans in a castle (they can leave that castle when they want), your opponents need to bring a few more troops every turn, because a dozen more of your units are repairing the walls every turn.

However, making them patrol sure doesn't sound useful when you speak about 40 of them. But you will have hundreds of them if you have turmoil. Given the choice, I'll have 400 maenads with 10 indy basic 30 gold commander in a few choice provinces (total cost / turn : 20 gold) than lots of armies of 40 harpies (I believe the cost is rounded up ?) that cost me 42 gold per turn, and costed 310 initial gold instead of the 300 gold with maenads + commanders, that is completly useless outside of gold collection purposes, and easily beaten by guerrilla tactics.

Routing with pangaea is really a non-problem. The dryad can spam sermon of courage, and I rarely see maenads retreat, especially when they are berserk.

Luck, well, luck is a vast subject. It brings in a lot more than a few gems. It brings you untracable wealth (not shown on the graphs), castles, free troops, castles, magic items...).

Finally, you will look much more vulnerable with a high order scale than with a turmoil one : lots of maenads are intimidating, and rightly so.

The point being, going for turmoil works very well. But it's another way to play that work probably more in MP than SP, since it rely on surprises, stealth, luck.