Pangaea advice

[WraithLord]

Hi,

I am soon about to start a PBEM game as Pangaea.
I played a bit with that nation and tried several approaches. None of which was too successful.

I have a few specific questions and I would appreciate any further tips on playing Pangaea.

1. Should I take high turmoil?
High turmoil attracts maenads but lowers taxes increase unrest and forces me to patrol heavily.

2. Should I take high production?
Some heavy resource units - satyr hoplite and the armored mino.
Perhaps I can do with high sloth and produce low resource units and the sacred white centaurs?

3. Should I take high luck? Should I build for cross-breed spell?

4. I've tested a blood fountain pretender with high turmoil. It crippled my economy.
Is there a sound strategy for building blood economy?

5. Should I use a bless effect pretender? Which are the most suitable?

[ May 31, 2004, 13:14: Message edited by: izaqyos ]

[HJ]

From my (limited) experience:
If you take strong turmoil (3), you'll be getting more maenads by the midgame than you can spend or effectively ship to the front with just 5-6 pans in the capitol. The question is wheter you'll survive until then, but if you do, you'll have to recruit a hierophant every turn just to get them out of there, and have an ever-flowing stream of reinforcements.
Centaurs and regular minotaurs can make a short work of any regular army, but it's essential that you have something to soak up the arrows and inital shock, and maenads are good for this since they are free, abundant and don't rout easily regardless of high casualties. Another alternative would be revelers, which are cheap and still won't rout easily, and which you'll be able to afford quite a lot if you take order - forget about regular satyrs if you don't want to pick them up in the neighbouring provinces after each battle.
I have had good results with using fire 9 blessing with white centaurs, due to their speed and overall high stats. This means that they will be able to reach the back lines quickly and make a short work of anything that's there. Even if they do get hit, which is not too likely (high def, prot, mr for a recruitable unit, particulary of such speed), they'll go berserk and get the job done.
Since I almost exclusively played regular Pangaea with high turmoil, the armored troops (cataphracts, hoplites, war minos) didn't fit in well, so I have nothing too good to say about them. If you want to play with them, however, my suggestion would be to take New Era instead of the default anyway.
You can also try sneaky tactics with your whole armies, but maenads that make the bulk of my armies cannot sneak, so I generally didn't employ sneaking much. If you go with reveler option, however, this is more viable, as you'll have armies composed of recruited stealthy units for raiding - even serious raiding if you manage to sneak in with centaurs.
Another cool thing with Pangaea are the hierophants. They are cheap, able commanders and priests to boot, have good precision, and if you hit a pan with random in air or indie mages with air, give them longbows of accuracy for some added fun.
Blood and crossbreeding are useful at the beginning, since you'll probably take luck if you took turmoil (and this is not nearly as bad as it used to be), but blood hunting is expensive for Pangaea, the cost of Pandemoniacs being a bit prohibitive.
And, as a Last note, be weary of the fire-using nations, since the 6th spell your pans and dryads are going to cast will alomst invariably be protection or mass protection. Minotaurs make lovely torches after that.

Cheers,

[ June 01, 2004, 01:24: Message edited by: HJ ]

[Vynd]

I wouldn't go for a bless strategy with Pangaea, since they only have the one sacred combat unit. But if I did go with a bless strategy, I definitely wouldn't use the nature blessing that some have suggested, since it will make your Dryads, Pans, an Hierophants into berserkers rather than the spell casters you mostly want them to be. And your sacred centaurs already have basic berserking anyway.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Vynd:
But if I did go with a bless strategy, I definitely wouldn't use the nature blessing that some have suggested, since it will make your Dryads, Pans, an Hierophants into berserkers rather than the spell casters you mostly want them to be.

Pans are not sacred, so they don't receive any benefit from a blessing. They probably have the highest upkeep of any unit in the game, but also have a very large set of abilities that go along with this cost.

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Vynd:
I wouldn't go for a bless strategy with Pangaea, since they only have the one sacred combat unit. But if I did go with a bless strategy, I definitely wouldn't use the nature blessing that some have suggested, since it will make your Dryads, Pans, an Hierophants into berserkers rather than the spell casters you mostly want them to be. And your sacred centaurs already have basic berserking anyway.

Losing a few dryads to berserking isn't crippling, and careful positioning of them can minimize even that. Hierophants on the other paw have such minimal priestly spell casting that them going berserk wouldn't be such a bad thing - they're better for combat than priesting, except against undead.

Pans I'd be concerned about losing to berserk - but unless I'm mistaken, the only ones you have to worry about are the Pan you make your prophet, and Carrion Lord/Lady/Centaur summonables when playing Carrion Woods. Regular Pans aren't sacred, albeit with CW I don't take nature above 3 because with it, almost all your commanders could go berserk. (Again, Carrion Centaurs you'd probably want going berserk, but not Lords and Lazies.)

[ June 01, 2004, 03:44: Message edited by: Cainehill ]

[Cainehill]

Oh - the other thing that can mitigate Pangaea's sacred troops being capitol only is finding Amazon provinces. In a large enough game, the odds are fairly good you'll find one or two provinces with at least jade or onyx amazons, albeit crystal and garnet are much more rare.

The great thing about finding these is that if you're playing a heavy bless strategy, you now have a new sacred type to bring into play. If I'm not mistaken, each type of Amazon has a sacred troop - Nightmares, Gryphon Riders, etc.

But this is actually true of bless strategies in general, not specific to Pangaea, and is still gambling. Either you find a way to move your sacred troops to the combat lines (gateway, Flying Ship, Faery Trod, etc) or they may not do you enough good.

Hmmm. Anything other than Amazon provinces give other (non-national, non-summoned) sacred troops?

[ June 01, 2004, 04:03: Message edited by: Cainehill ]

[WraithLord]

I did some testing with the following.
Lord of Nature, 4 nature, 1 blood, 3 turmoil, 0 prod, 3 luck, 2 magic.
I immediately recruited a pan to attract maenads.
Then I recruited a mino commander and made him my prophet and set him on hold/cast*5, attack closest and put him in the center with 2-5 minos on hold, attack closest. He is really strong in battles!
My first army was composed of my pretender, prophet and that white centaur commander (forgot it's name).
With indies strength of 8, I started capturing provinces at turn 5.
I would capture a province, search it and capture the next.
At the mean time I recruited pans and dryads ( for research) in my capital.
At turn 12 I had four pans and started receiving a fair amount of maenads each turn.
I plan next to employ a second strong army to capture strong indie provinces and then employ stealthy teams of centaur warriors to capture lightly guarded enemy provinces.
I slapped some minor magic items on my pretender and truth is he's performing very well in battles.

Thanks for all the advice.

[Karacan]

Originally posted by Cainehill:
Hmmm. Anything other than Amazon provinces give other (non-national, non-summoned) sacred troops?

I believe that the Seahorses are sacred underwater units. Can't think of any other land-based sacreds, though.

[Arralen]

sacred units
..there's a site that lets you recruit danoine sidhe, witches are holy, too ..

Panaea
You may want to try out my Pangaea mod ... beefs up the Satyrs somewhat, but without unbalancing the nation. Some more minor changes, too...

Don't buy more than 2 Pans in the first 20 turns if you're going with turmoil-3 ... they are mucho expensive with 23,3 gp/turn just for upkeep. And you won't be able to get rid of all those maenads anyway if you keep at least one of them in a decent dominion.
I usually put on in my army and have on sitting in a lab in a border castle, doing nature summonings and forgings and generating maenads.

And while a minotaur prophet makes a great combat unit, but not a real SC, boosting a dryad to priest-4 makes her much more invaluable especially considering the low morale most pangaeans troops have.
if you really want a minotaur prophet, wait for that national hero - one more reason to go for the turmoil-3/luck-3 path: Pangaeas national heros are just so useful!!

Ok, have to leave now

[Vynd]

Graeme is right, of course. (Darn that Graeme!) Pans aren't sacred. (Darn those Pans!) I still don't find the idea of a nature blessing all that attractive, though. Because the warriors already have some berserking ability, for one thing. And for another, you'll be putting lots of points into Nature magic on your Pretender, when your Pans are already extremely good at it.