Guide: MA Pangaea strategies

[quantum_mechani]

Dedas said:
Armored units are quite easily dealt with the nice tune of dancing death and tune of growth that your dryads can sing. Now, now, I know you will all say it's too risky having mages up front but stay with me.

First let's look at "Tune of Dancing Death":

Area effect 15, stun damage 31+, fatigue 5, armor negating, magic resistance negates.

"Tune of Growth"
AoE 15, entangles enemies, depends on growth scale

The clever thing is that these tunes comes in harmony with comman pangean scales and strategies.
Growth adds to ToG
Magic +3 helps ToDD negate MR on enemies
200gp temples makes it very cheap to spread dominion
The dryad is cheap in initial cost (110), cheap in large numbers due to holiness, and is also a priest able to build temples.
Dryad has Awe +2 and no encumbering armor + able to cast barkskin with her N1 + able to forge a hide shield with the same to protect her from arrows.

The plan
Take three or four dryads (no less for best effect).
Forge a barkskin shield for each one (easy with 6N gem income from start)
Research alteration 1
Attack where dominion and scale is on your side to help with awe and magic negation.
In battle, place some chaff first (satyrs or maenads) and behind them the dryads mixed with satyrs (almost same movement). Script: 1 barkskin 2 attack one, ToDD, ToDD, Tune of Fear.

That is it. It really does work and the dryads thanks to awe, chaff, barkskin and shield. I always use this strategy when expanding and the results are more than often great. Of course you will rarely lose a dryad now and then but it is worth considering how many troops you would lose otherwise.

Try it. Experiment with placement as that is key.

Oh, tune of growth is just ridiculously effective on barbarians because of low MR (against growth) and low morale (against awe). Also, they have no bows to shoot the dryads with. That is one reason I always buy a dryad on the first turn so that I can claim any province defended by barbarians much easier.

I just want to add that the trick is really to use multiple dryads to sing the tunes as the three songs scale nicely.

While I greatly admire the creativity of this tactic, I just can't see it being much use in competitive MP.

First of all, Pan is ironically one of the nations least suited for growth scale, with no old mages and very optional blood hunting. As I recall the growth effect on the vines is pretty minor in any case.

The biggest problems though are simply how long it takes to get this rolling, and the lost research by not having those dryads researching. On average indy settings, you can more or less recruit an expanding army every turn just from revelers, without losing the research or spending the gems. Not to mention being more all purposely useful when you run into another player.

On an unrelated note, one very important Pan tactic I have not seen mentioned here is the turn 1 harpy buy. If you buy a full pack of harpies the first turn, you can usaully set them to patrolling with taxes at 200%, even while your starting army goes off to conquer. This can lead to a huge leg up in the early game, with all of Pangeaea's effective but gold intensive troop options. It also helps with affording those early Pans and pretty much everything else, the catch of course is lower income late game from your capital. With the additional gold, though, you have good chance of capturing additional capitals anyway.

[Dedas]

Growth is not needed of course, as the tunes work very well even without it (perhaps death is too much though).

Yes you are losing some research, but as dryads are also pretty good commanders (40) they can lead small armies. With tunes they can cut down on troop amount directing money to fortresses leading to faster research.

I can agree on that dryads are not the best unit to use initially, though later on you will have loads of them as you hire them as researchers as well. Some of them could be used behind enemy lines accompanied with revelers and cause some damage. You might have noticed that they now have +25 stealth making them ideal stealth preachers whom are also capable of defending themselves.

Harpies are good for scouting and patrolling, that is for sure. Thanks for the tip.

[Omnirizon]

I think any effective Pan strat must utilize their amazing ability for stealth and cavalry raids. They simply have the best troops for such a strategy.

However, this nation is always been vexing for me to play. I try and get a grasp on the options they have available; but the requirements for pursuing any given strategy are often very contradictory to each other (high turmoil for Maened, but gold intensive troops, for example). Pan is the essence of chaos, and it is always hard for me to get a handle on this unusual nation.

Also, I think their nation specific pretenders are next to useless (with the exception of the Gorgon). LotW? Why would I want to spend actual design points on a glorified Pan? The Carrion Drag seems like a reasonable choice, but if you are serious about a carrion strat, you can pursue one as LA Pan without the dragon; thus in relation making this pretender in any other age a questionable investment.

[quantum_mechani]

Dedas said:
Growth is not needed of course, as the tunes work very well even without it (perhaps death is too much though).

Yes you are losing some research, but as dryads are also pretty good commanders (40) they can lead small armies. With tunes they can cut down on troop amount directing money to fortresses leading to faster research.

I can agree on that dryads are not the best unit to use initially, though later on you will have loads of them as you hire them as researchers as well. Some of them could be used behind enemy lines accompanied with revelers and cause some damage. You might have noticed that they now have +25 stealth making them ideal stealth preachers whom are also capable of defending themselves.

Harpies are good for scouting and patrolling, that is for sure. Thanks for the tip.

I'm still unclear if you are recommending it for expanding vs indies, or actually employing it against other nations. Expanding seems doable, though rather suboptimal, due to research troubles. Applying it directly against human players, the tactic strikes me as risky in the extreme, there are any number of counters from sacreds to mindless units to archers to damage spells.

I'd also advise against wasting time with stealth preaching in all but the most niche of situations (mostly after all research has been completed and you have many weak mage priests with little else to so).

Scout harpies I consider a whole other matter from early patrolling, even though harpy scouts have ten leadership, I wouldn't bother giving them harpy troops.

Anyway, I don't mean to be argumentative, just fostering some lively debate.

EDIT: I wholly agree on the lord of the wild being a quite poor choice (and the carrion dragon being by and large overshadowed by other choices), but it's not really an issue specific to Pan or national pretenders.

[RamsHead]

quantum_mechani said:
I'm still unclear if you are recommending it for expanding vs undies...

Expanding undies!

[kasnavada]

Why would I want to spend actual design points on a glorified Pan?

Well, I like him.

Because you can skip recruiting pans in the first few turns of the game, get loads of maenads anyway, and concentrate on dryad / research, and have a few more centaurs / minotaurs / satyrs in the first turns. Which can also help a lot in getting provinces. Because in my opinion, pans are mostly useful for maenads or diversifying magic path (useful in mid game).

Also, if you take some blood magic with him, you can completly skip the use of pandemoniac and concentrate on commander summon with blood magic / pans.

Finally, he's stealthy. That means that you can also use the one automatic dominion increase in enemy territory.

While it may not be competitive enough or not suited to your tastes, maybe... but he's not useless. Far from it. Even if I got little doubt that other pretender surpass him in all the function I see him do, he can, like most pangaea troops, adapt to a lot of situations.

Actually, if it were not for the maenads possible access to blood magic (allowing sabbath and reinvigorisation) and death magic (carrions), I'll skip pans altogether. Quite often, getting 3 dryads will be more useful than a single Pan. Dryads are better for preaching, researching, stealth, their price means you don't care much if a few die (which isn't the case for pans... 3 dead is 1k gold gone to waste). In my opinion, pans are useful for advanced casting of earth and nature spells (with boosters), to start a death magic and blood magic economy, and to generate troops. I rarely want them on the front lines. However, they are very useful behind generating maenads, creating items and casting spells. Which means you don't actually need that many of them.

Speaking of which, another use for dryads and carrion commanders are wine arrow firing platform... however you need to research evocation 2. For me, it looks like evocation is not the most useful path to research, since the nature spells are mostly useful with poison-resistant troops, and since there is no spell in it that can be casted with pans (nor any other native units for that matter). That said, wines and carrions are immune to poison and summoned commanders have varying amounts of nature magic, so spamming poison cloud in combinaison with those troops could lead good results, but evocation 6 is a big drawback for that.

One last thing for carrion summons. AFAIK, the carrion lords are the only units you have with 3 level in priest magic. They are also stealthy, and got 3 in nature magic too. That make it interresting to summon a few with pans empowered or boosted in death magic.

[quantum_mechani]

RamsHead said:

Expanding undies!

Ah, right to the heart of the issue, an inescapable point (at least, barring stealth edits).

[Dedas]

Well, putting all your money into research in the early game is one viable strategy.
Another is to put it in military units (if you have good ones as Pan does) to expand your economy by grabbing as many provinces as possible and still be able to defend them from early rushers.
Yet another, and a more common one, is to try doing everything at once. This will of course make your error marginal smaller, as one unlucky event (like losing your pretender) can cost you the game.

Which way you choose depends of course on the situation at hand, like your own nation, the psyche of your opponents, the map size and so forth.

The point I'm making is that there isn't just one "best way" to begin the game. There are a lot of difficult questions to answer and decide upon. Yes research is important, but so is expanding, not to forget defense or offense against other players. Should you balance all these or will one lead to the other in a more stable and powerful way if you maximize it? Indeed difficult questions, not easily answered.

[Gregstrom]

kasavada: There are a couple of evocations that Pans can cast, although most will need Earth Boots or Summon Earthpower to do it. Firstly, there's Blade Wind, which isn't too shabby a spell. Then there's Earthquake - a bit of a stretch for most Pans, but if you're using lots of armoured centaurs then you can get away with casting a couple in a fight, causing much more suffering to the enemy than yourself.

[edit] Added some notes on early turns.

[quantum_mechani]

Dedas said:

The point I'm making is that there isn't just one "best way" to begin the game. There are a lot of difficult questions to answer and decide upon. Yes research is important, but so is expanding, not to forget defense or offense against other players. Should you balance all these or will one lead to the other in a more stable and powerful way if you maximize it? Indeed difficult questions, not easily answered.

I'd say this only goes up to a point. Putting aside somewhat degenerate/special situations (very odd game settings, some duels), most front runner players follow rather consistent paths. There are many things you will almost never see such players use, and others that will almost always get abused at the slightest opportunity. So I suppose my point is that while a true and ultimate "best way" is unlikely to be agreed upon, it is in general possible to classify a particular tactic as useful or suboptimal with a significant degree of accuracy.

With this particular tactic what I'm getting at is I believe you can expand just as fast or faster without it while maintaining faster research.