Knowing that the pretender will be used with Arcoscephale helps, but to get the most out of her, you need to consider how you want to play the nation - and there are different strategies to chose from.
Scales are very dependent on how you want to develop your strategy, but since heat and luck have been discussed, I will comment on that.
When it comes to temperature scales, my observations so far have been that it is much more usual to have your chosen scales in provinces with reasonable dominion, than it is to have it off by a level. I remain very sceptical to claims that temperature deviates half the year.
For this reason I am not particularly fond of paying for another scale with temperature for monetary reasons. In the case of Order, it could of course be warranted if you want the extra event reduction as well, but if you have positive luck scales that is more of a detriment.
However you choose to go here, I strongly advise against going for H3. Arcoscephale has both heavy armoured units and tramplers available, none of which manage especially well under additional encumbrance.
As for luck, I also think that it is somewhat underrated. You do not know exactly what you get and when, but in the end it all adds up rather nicely. Still it depends on the nation and strategy, but I happen to think that positive luck works very well for Arcoscephale. Especially the extra gems are very useful as it saves valuable mage time in the early game. I have never played a game as Arcoscephale with positive luck where I have not received enough gems to start an economy with them without having to send out a couple of mages to manually search for an initial income. This together with all the rest you get out of it, makes it well worth it.
When it comes to paths on the pretender, I think you should consider removing the earth levels. It is very expensive and your national mages can already cover earth adequately. It is a nice path for SCs, but it can be covered for by equipment. In MA I could see an argument for nature instead, but otherwise I think going to S6 and adding a couple of extra scales instead would work better. The S6 will make her more resilient agains Mind Duel and make a lot of high level astral spells easier to cast. And you will be able to use wish without empowering.
Another way is to keep her at A4S4 and have her awake. Even if you are not used to her you can take easy independents with her from the start and once alteration 1 is researched, personal luck makes her more resilient.
And lastly, a bit off topic:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sombre
There are still a lot of non cbm games played. Not necessarily those in the AAR subforum though.
|
I want to second this.
Moreover, though I do not use CBM in my games, I have managed to learn a lot from posts on these boards that were about CBM. I very much doubt that the converse could not be true.
I need to keep a copy of CBM for evaluation purposes, of course, but everyone using CBM does automatically have access to the ordinary game, so that cannot be a problem.
In short, discussions about non-CBM are not pointless.