[rdonj]

Pretenders, huh? When you're designing a pretender for a nation, it's a good idea to take a look at the nation first. Just start a game quickly, browse through the nation's troop and mage lineup, and check what national spells they have. Take note of what's available. I'll use... EA Tir na N'og as an example case, since I was just talking about them in another thread.

If you look at TNN, you'll see that most of their stuff is expensive. Very, very expensive. With relatively low resource costs on its units, particularly units that are not cap-only. And that's not even counting the mages, which again are ridiculously expensive. Tuatha Warriors are a decent sacred that are quite capable of expanding under a number of blesses, but as the game wears on they will become less and less effective in comparison to your commander units. Because of this, this nation is an excellent choice for order and sloth, since gold is by far the most significant resource you'll be expending. If you had more resource-intensive units, or a really powerful cap only non-sacred, you could consider taking production instead of or in addition to order. Or if your nation didn't have decent expansion off the bat without it. TNN can do just fine without, though.

Temperature scales are a bit give and take. Personally I almost always take a temperature shift of one. This gives you extra points, and doesn't hurt you that much really because seasonal temperature shift will make the penalty closish to zero. Which temperature scale you pick should you take one depends on a number of factors, primarily which enemies you expect to encounter and whether you plan on using units that may have heat or cold auras. In SP my first inclination would probably be to take cold. Largely because it would make abysia less annoying :P And in SP I think abysia is a bigger pain than niefel is. In MP, well, I might still pick cold, but that's largely because TNN can theoretically make frost resist rings. Anyway, moving on.

Luck/misfortune is always a bit give and take. TNN has... not great PD, but it's certainly better than some. Plus you can fairly easily retake provinces once you have some thugs going. Also if you're going with order, luck doesn't really stack that well with it until your empire is fairly large. That's pretty much the choice here... go with order and maybe some misfortune, or leave order at 0 and go for luck instead. Luck will mean less bad events, and more gems... which could be good, as TNN could desperately use some magic diversity. Luck is also very good for nations with good path diversity... which sadly TNN is not. You'll never have as much gold with luck as you will with order, though.

Death/growth... meh. I hate death and never take it. Growth is good for long games, death is... acceptable for quick games. Do not take death and misfortune in combination, ever. TNN does not particularly need growth as it has no old mages, and it should be able to expand quickly. If you need points, you can consider taking death.

Magic should almost always be taken at level 1, basically no matter who you are playing as. Especially in MP. TNN is not an exception to this. Its mages are all overpriced and fairly expensive, you really need some magic to offset the cost. Nations with recruit everywhere high research mages can consider taking drain, especially if they're capable of forging lightless lanterns/skull mentors. TNN can make owl quills, but... you'll have much better uses for air gems, later. Especially in MP. Taking drain without meeting the above criteria is a bad idea.

A dominion of at least 6 should always be taken in multiplayer, or you're in danger of a domkill. Especially if your pretender is not awake. You're not in MP though so for the moment use whatever you like. You want to spread your dominion around to all your provinces though.



Okay, that takes care of scales. On to your actual pretender! TNN lacks a few things. Reliably decent earth magic, death, astral, blood, and fire. These are serious lacks, and at some point you really are going to want to try to fix these. That requires help from your pretender, lucky site finding, and/or empowerment later on. Another thing TNN largely lack is good, non-sacred expansion options. Sidhe warriors do work, but they're very expensive and not as reliable as tuatha warriors. If you don't go with a bless though they are your best option due largely to the glamour abilitiy, which will significantly cut down on their chance to be killed in melee. As TNN has no trouble casting any of its national spells, you don't have to worry about your pretender fixing that. Which leaves the other thing that they're lacking, an end game :P (note that if you play with llama's endgame diversity mod, they at least sort of have an end game)

The typical way to play TNN is as a bless nation. I use tuatha warriors to expand and move to sidhe lords once I hit alteration 3, as this allows them to defeat entire provinces by themselves without gear, just by blessing and casting a few protective spells. E9N4 is the typical TNN bless because it makes their sidhe lords ridiculously powerful and efficient. It's also not bad for the troops. They'll work with other blesses too, but if you go with a blessed TNN, not getting e9 is a bit wasteful.

On the other hand, playing TNN with e9n4 does little to fix their difficulties with magic diversity or having a late game. If you want a late game focused TNN, you could consider an awake or at worst dormant research/sitesearching god for them. As said before they lack much e access, and lack d, f, s and b entirely. Any such god should have enough of the above to help break into these paths. You could also possibly work some minor blesses in here which might be useful to you, but you'll likely have a weaker midgame without having a powerful bless for your sidhe. Instead of being fine with just a frost brand and a vine/eye shield, you'll want to build additional gear to fix their fatigue issues at the minimum (likely rainbow armor + girdle of might). They'll still lack the regen though unless you take 4n on your rainbow pretender... not very economical.

Of course, that's not taking into account any specific goals you may have. TNN can make good use of a number of globals, and it can be worth it to keep in mind the casting of certain key spells when building your pretender. This is getting a bit too long though so I'll stop now. Hopefully I've been helpful!