Better Know a Pretender: The Virtue

[Fantomen]

Originally Posted by Sombre

Barbarians wouldn't berserk from being hit, because one hit would kill them. But I think they could berserk from a repel. Then again with that awe, they would never get repelled.

So yeah, barbs would be safe, as they'd never berserk.

Barbarians don´t have berserk, only the chief.

Barbarian chiefs are viable mini-thugs in CBM btw...

[Calahan]

Pretty well known I thought that Awe is one of the best defences around against tramplers.

@ Fantomen - Ok I'll bite. How do you go about creating a mini-thug with a barb chief. Is it just a big chunk of armour and a lychan amulet to take advantage of the big berserk bonus you'd get?

[OmikronWarrior]

Originally Posted by Sombre

Barbarians wouldn't berserk from being hit, because one hit would kill them. But I think they could berserk from a repel. Then again with that awe, they would never get repelled.

So yeah, barbs would be safe, as they'd never berserk.

As said earlier, only barbarian chiefs get beserk. However, I'd still say barbarians pose a significant threat to the Virtue even at +7 Awe. 2 main reasons: 1) large numbers, 2) high damage. Without a fear aura, the Virtue has to kill the barbarians one by one, which gains 1 fatigue every round. Though I'm a bit confused by routing mechanics, it would appear that 50% casualties must be suffered before a retreat is contemplated. So, if a Virtue attacks a 50 barbarian province, thats accumulating a lot of swings that will add up in the fatigue column. Plus, when barbarians do hit, they average 15 damage give or take. On a 40 HP, chasis, thats affliction likely, to say nothing of death possible. Better dominion helps, but that still means slowing down expansion. Feel free to test this out yourself. The Virtue will survive some just fine, but other times will retreat with 2 new afflictions ending her SC career (barring healers, but that still delays the vitals expansion phase).

Obviously, a bit of equipment (or XP) can quickly change this dynamic.

[chrispedersen]

Routing:

Routing can be caused by unit casualties (where a casualty is a heavy wound or a death).

It can also be caused by a army casualty levels. Route checks are made a single time with light casualties- but every round once casualties reach heavy.

The manual says units of four or less check - thats not my experience.

However, it is fairly reproducible that pans carrion dragon (plague breath which causes couple points of damage) and area fear - on top of aura and +18 fear on the dragon will cause routes without causing a single death...

Wounds count..

this is why I said barbarians can kill a virtue - they come in groups of up to a hundred commonly - A virtue will be losing fatigue faster than it will be able to kill barbarians / inflict a morale check. Ie., you'd have to inflict 10/20/25? before the first serious check - and even then then survivor bonus means the barbs will pass.

[vfb]

Originally Posted by Sombre

Barbarians wouldn't berserk from being hit, because one hit would kill them. But I think they could berserk from a repel. Then again with that awe, they would never get repelled.

So yeah, barbs would be safe, as they'd never berserk.

My god got totally jacked up once by attacking a barbarian province that for some reason had an H2 priest in it (no militia, so it was a special poptype maybe?) Anyway, Sermon of Courage can be bad if you are depending on Awe.

[Fantomen]

Originally Posted by Calahan

Pretty well known I thought that Awe is one of the best defences around against tramplers.

@ Fantomen - Ok I'll bite. How do you go about creating a mini-thug with a barb chief. Is it just a big chunk of armour and a lychan amulet to take advantage of the big berserk bonus you'd get?

In CBM the chief has 25hp, berserk 3, 13 base attack and defence, strength 15 and cost 40 gold. Thats a pretty tough guy for the price. Now we will imagine that you have no fort or mage sites there so he´s not competing with any other units. You can easily just let the chiefs pile up until you have a dozen or so.

I see two kinds of uses. Either as an anti-sc; just give them the prefered weapons and swarm the subject. Might be what you need against sc:s with awe sometime.

Otherwise you can make them battlefield thugs with a couple(more than 2 is too expensive) items and combine with army buffs and bodyguards. I like stars of thraldom when I have them sprinkled in my regular infantry. Lycan ammys are an alternative, or shrouds if you have a bless.

The general idea is to get them for "free", using leftover gems that your nation don´t need to make them a cheap weapon and throw them out there to kill a bunch before dying. quantity over quality

It´s not a strategy in itself, but sometimes you need to scrape the bottom of the cauldron.

[Calahan]

Last time I checked CBM 1.5, the barb chief only had 15HP and regular Att/Def skills IIRC. I certainly missed many of the early versions of CBM, so maybe the barb chief was turbo-charged in one of them.

But if a barb chief ever had 25HP, then I can certainly see him having a great use as a thug. Especially because, as you say, he wouldn't compete in the build queue, or even take up mage time to summon. In fact a 25HP barb chief might be pretty much Mr.Go-To in the early-mid game. With just 5-10 gem worth of items he'd be pretty tasty.

[Fantomen]

Damn it, I checked again now and it seems I was wrong. I guess I forgot to turn off the Antilarium mod last time I played and obviously that one was responsible for the change. Sorry.

[Amorphous]

First a rather important omission in my former post: The Virtue needs dom 10 to be able to expand properly without equipment or extra magic pics - at least in my opinion. The difference between +4 and +7 awe is huge when it comes to independents.


Regarding routing the independents I have never noticed a problem and you certainly do not need to kill off half of the army in order to rout them. While not being at all certain as to why, I guess that it might be because at least the more numerous indies tend to be organized in units and once you rout a reasonably big unit, the rest of the army soon follows.

As for extra magic paths it mostly depends on what nation she is used for. Death can be fun and make for a very effective SC with fear in addition to the awe and the very good spell selection from that school, but ultimately I usually go for earth or nature, as that works well with the national mages I tend to use. This is certainly a situation where it varies by nation, though.
Generally, though, I find it too expensive to go for D5, especially as it is not as good as dom10 for initial expansion. To me it seems that air/death would work best if you go for a sleeping Virtue.



Regarding CBM:
Though I do not really play CBM, I do have a copy in order to be able to adapt some what I see here on the boards, and as far as I can see the Virtue costs exactly the same here. Am I missing something?

Furthermore, while the change from A2 to A1/S1 makes her pretty perfect for EA Arcoscephale, it tends to make her more expensive for a lot of the other nations that can use her. I more or less always want A4, for early booster access if nothing else, and as mentioned earth and nature tend to be my preferred additions. What this means is that you need to fork over an extra 24 points for air and since you are eventually going to use her in combat, you need to pay at least another 24 - more likely 48 - points for astral that you probably could use better elsewhere. With the low initial paths there are virtually always a better pretender to choose if you want a accomplished caster in either - or both - schools. As I see it, the changes mainly detract from her charm as a rather fragile, but cheap and flying high dominion chassis for air access with SC potential.

[P3D]

There's a barbarian lord that comes with the horde events - 16 HP, still not enough.
I like the idea to make Barbarian chieftains a recruitable thug Conan-style though. Give them a iron cap, Enc 1 and 18HP.