Better Know a Pretender: The Virtue

[OmikronWarrior]

I was digging through some old back up drives when I came accross this old file. At the time, I was thinking it'd be fun to ape Stephen Colbert's "Better know a Congressional District" and write guides centered around a Pretender instead of a nation, which is probably less time consuming. I apparently abadoned the project until I found this word document, and it was nearly completed. So, I finished it off and here it is. If anyone else wants to contribute to the project, feel free. Without further ado, enjoy!

Better Know a Pretender: The Virtue

A divine messenger, descended from the heavens and a physical manifestation of all that is good and right. As a chassis, the Virtue has a lot to recommend it, but ultimately needs help in a few areas to be competitive. Lets start with the basics:

Cost: 50
Base Dominion: 4
HP: 39
Size: 3
Strength: 13
Attack: 13
Defense: 13
Precision: 15
Base Protection: 5 (no armor)
Starting Magic: Air-2 and 80 points per new path
Starting equipmnet: Flambeau (13 damage, 4 attack, 2 defense, AP, x3 vs undead, Fire effect)
Movement: 3 and Flying
Base Encumbrance: 1
Miscellaneous: Awe+4, 50% resistance to Lightning and Fire, Magic Being
Availability: Caelum, Arcosephale, Pythium, Marignon, Bogarus, Ashdod, Gath, Ulm (MA and LA), and Ermor (EA and MA).

Pros: Should be fairly obvious. It's cheap, it comes with Awe standard, and has the same high dominion as immobile pretenders while being incredibly mobile itself. Also, it has the lowest encumbrance of any living pretender. Almost every other chassis out there has either 3 or 4 base encumbrance compared to her 1. This gives the player a little more flexibility in equipment. Finally, Air magic is one of the best for thugs and Super Combatants to have. It combines great mobility (Cloud Trapeze) with great buffs (Air Shield, Mistform and Mirror Image).

Cons: HP could be higher. Also, lousy starting equipment. Sure Awe will keep the weak from attacking, but if they do the Virtue cannot take a lot of punishment upfront, meaning research and/or construction are necessary to really use her. What might be worse, however, is the lack of effective killing or routing options. With out Fear or multiple attacks, the Virtue is limited to only attacking sparsely defended independent provinces, and even that carries risks.

Awake Strategy: In case you did not get my hints above, the Virtue is not awake SC material in the same manner as the Wyrm or the Prince of Death. Unless you pay to add another path and plan on doing some early site searching, you might as well put her to sleep so when she does wake up your nation has the buffs and gems to use her effectively. You might be tempted to think otherwise, let Awe nullify the meelee threats and Air Shield (a level zero spell) worry about the arrows. Unfortunately, in a world of undead and beserkers and lucky rolls, Awe (even with the +3 bonus of Dominion-10) can be overcome, and Air Shield will still let 1 in 5 arrows through. The odds of getting hit are small, but the margin of error is equally small. The Virtue has no default shield, little in the way of protection, no natural regeneration, and only a moderate HP total. As fatigue starts to pile up, she can get in a lot of trouble. However, once you take into account these weakness, the inherent strengths begin to shine.

Typical equipment includes: boots of the messenger, Weightless Scale Mail, Horror Helm, Fire Brand, Frost Brand, Boots of Quickness, Amulet of Anti-Magic, Amulet of Luck, Amulet of Resilience, Girdle of Might, and any encumbrance 1 or less shield. A lot of this will depend on what your nation has available and what your neighbors are willing to trade. Now an example of a good SC script is: Air Shield, Mistform, Mirror Image, Resist Lightening (if necessary), Orb Lightning, Attack Rear. Mistform and Mirror Image really are the best buffs, though, especially if the Virtue's meant to take out PD and under maged armies.

Bless Strategy: Almost non-existent. Air as a bless is very, very niche. The Virtue may be the cheapest way to get Air-8 or Air-9, but the Air Shield effect only benefits sacreds with a strong melee presence (such as awe and high defense), but have low or no protection and parry. 75% Shock protection is also points probably better spent elsewhere.

Army Strategy: Air has some very nice buffs. Wind guide is the second best Archer buff in the game granting +5 precision to all units. This bonus is not effected by Darkness or Storms, which is another spell the Virtue can cast to drastically reduce enemy effectiveness, along side its weaker (and lower on the research tree) syblling Mists, though the spells stack. Finally, the Virtue can cast the incredibly powerful Fog Warriors which grants Mistform to every unit on the field. Once a Virtue is done casting buffs, if it has any fatigue left, it becomes a powerful spell caster. The insanely high Base precision of 15 combines with the bonus provided by Air Magic to grant precision of 19 or 20 easy. Air or Wind Guide tacks on another 5. This lets the Virtue Cast Thunder Strike like Lightning Bolt and make any enemy SC pay for not coming equipped with Shock immunity. Put a little close to the front, and the Virtue will start casting Orb Lightning, a cheap fatigue spell that scales wonderfully with Air Magic.

Magic Diversity Strategy: The Virtue is a great way to break into Air. Remember, Air Boosters (Winged Helm and Wing Bag) can only be forged by an Air-4 unit, and even the magic heavy EA only has four nations with that as a default. Yet, there are a lot more nations with Air-3 in which getting the first Air booster means many more can be forged. By starting with Air-4 or Air-5, the Virtue can summon Air Queens for even more Air Magic and SC's. Unfortunately, additional paths costs 80 design points for the Virtue. In general, most Virtue builds will stick with just Air Magic. Still Death-5 gives the Virtue a Fear effect for greater Awake SC duties. Earth is another fantastic path for SC's (Earth Power, extra protection) and opens the door to forging Elemental Staffs(+1 to Air, Earth, Fire, and Water). Blood lets the Virtue forge Robes of the Magi (+1 to every magic path), and might be achievable through empowerment and boosters to blood nations (Assuming any blood nations get the Virtue).

Conclusion: The Virtue certainly lacks that “One province captured per turn from turn One” that the Wyrm, Prince of Death, and a handful of other Pretenders give players and thus will always play second fiddle. However, the Virtue's low cost, impressive Awe, high dominion, easy access to Air Magic, and full slots make it progressively more useful against opposing enemy armies once the land grab is done.

[Amorphous]

While I agree with most of what you are saying, I find that you downplay the Virtue's province grabbing abilities a bit too much.

She certainly is no Wyrm, but as long as she is handled differently, she can take take a lot of indies. You have to stay away from indies that have the ability to ignore your awe as well as some of the beefier ones, but for the rest she works fine.

The main reason for this is that she can compensate her lack of ability in taking some indies with that perfectly awesome flying mobility. Her flying also ties in with her equipment and high awe when it comes to explaining her actual combat ability. The Flamberge actually suits her very well as it makes her a pretty decent killing machine while giving her enough defence to have a reliable second attempt at stopping damage, should her awe fail to a lucky roll. With a base 13 strength (you might want to include that in your guide) the 13 AP damage from the flamberge is exactly what she needs and the 4/2 in attack/defence means that she hits and kills one time per round while having an impressive 15 defense. The last makes her rather hard to hit and after about 2 stars of experience, which she attains very quickly, she is practically impossible to hit for most indies even aside from awe.

Apart from giving her excellent fleeing options if really bad luck should be in the cards, her flying also helps dealing with archers. Nothing can prevent her from just flying up to the indie archers and start killing. This will make a lot of archers unwilling to use their ranged attack and they also keep a good number of more beefy infantry away from the Virtue.

In conclusion I find the Virtue a decent expander from turn two. Mostly she will take a province each turn for the first year, but if bad luck with indie placement prevents it, that usually only means a province or possibly two less the first year.

[Trumanator]

Keep in mind also that in CBM the virtue is much cheaper and also has 1S.

[paarfi]

What nations could best make use of a Virtue? She's not available to all nations, and she'd be a hard to use if you needed a heavy bless. The added astral in cbm is nice, but the reduced price is countered somewhat by the need to go to astral 4 or so to avoid being magic dueled, yes?

[Trumanator]

I don't know off the top of my head who gets her, but LA Pythium could easily make use of an A?S4 Virtue.

[Squirrelloid]

This type of guide would be far more useful if every nation which had access to the Virtue was listed. I mean, A2+ sounds great, until you realize its not going to do much to break many nations into air because they *can't choose her*.

[statttis]

Off the top of my head, she is available to Caelum, Ermor, Pythium, Marignon, and Arcosephale. The air magic and expansion abilities are useful for at least Ermor and Arcos.

[OmikronWarrior]

OK, I added some of the requested information. I think I got all the nations. If anyone catches one I missed, let me know. As for expansion, I sort of agree with Amorph, but in the end feel like the margin for error is to small. But, still doable, especially with extra Awe. Regardless, Amorphous's comment stands on its own and gives players information to make their own desicions.

As for what nations could use the Virtue? I guess it depends on playstyle and strategy. I like using the Virtue as a sleeping Pretender and use the points to buy great scales and expans with national troops. That probably won't work with Bogarus, but does with Early or Middle Ermor. Then when she wakes, the nation is hopefully ready to outfit her better for war with Alteration and Construction research, the former of which also gives access to Wind Guide.

[aaminoff]

I think the Virtue is an awesome pretender, and I use the word advisedly. It works for me for Arco. However, you have to embrace the concept of Dominion-killing as what Arco is about. So pump up Dom to 9 or 10 (I think I did 10). This puts the Awe up to +7. This still was not enough, however, so I shelled out the points for Water 4. The boost to defence took it from getting hit once or twice in a fight with small-medium indys, acquiring an affliction, and needing to come back to be healed, to getting hit never. You can also very quickly research Ench-1 for Grip of Winter.

That is a lot of points, but Arco can have the points to spend. The only disadvantage is the bless you get is anemic, so you cannot throw your Oreiads around with quite the same lack of concern as you can with a bigger bless.

[OmikronWarrior]

Originally Posted by aaminoff

I think the Virtue is an awesome pretender...

That was Aweful.