Quote:
Originally Posted by llamabeast
Oh right yeah, I was trying it in LA. Maybe it's more powerful in the hands of the earlier Pangaeas.
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The "trick" is that in EA and MA Pangaea got (with earlier CBM's) Carrion Woods up on turn 10, latest. 5 nature gems per turn, and with high luck scale (there is absolutely no reason why EA or MA Pangaea shouldn't take Turmoil 3 and Luck 3) the 50 nature gems were collected even before turn 10. In fact, you could take your pretender sleeping, as with Luck 3 he is practically bound to wake up on turn 10. Add to that Pangaea absolutely *needs* Growth 3 in EA and MA (while the maenads are free, they still like to eat, damnit, and a horde of naked skinny women eat more than one would believe to be possible); incidently having Luck3 and Growth3 results in more of the better manikin, and you will be dancing in joy as those manikin elephants keep rolling out from the forest temples.
Now imagine you mix masses of maenads and manikin. The maenads basically autoberserk and rip apart the targets stunned by the manikin. Free stuff with high morale and stunning ability mixed with free stuff who go berserk but with crappy weapons (and when the opponent is already stunned, who cares what sort of weapon you are hitting with?). It doesn't get any better than that.
Carrion Woods is *much* less effective in LA in my opinion. First of all, fewer nature gems per turn, so you will get it up much later. Secondly, no maeanads to mix with the manikin (so either you send the manikin in alone and watch in horror the slaughter when the massed arrows and x-bow bolts hit your oh-so slowly moving dead plants, or you mix them with dryad hoplites and/or black centaurs and wonder why the heck you are spending so much effort on crap because the centaurs and dryads do just fine alone). Thirdly, dryad hoplites and black centaurs really ask for a (minor) bless strategy (and at the same time Pans get diversified to the other magic paths too, say for example W4F4A4 (plus 2 or 3 in earth and death) is excellent, as it gives access to all the astral stuff, staff of elements etc).
Summoning Carrion centaurs instead of getting CW up in LA is much more efficient in my opinion. The carrion centaurs will summon enough manikin to keep any snotty hostile SC's from walzing over your lands without proper support (becase killing lone thugs and SC's is the use for manikin in LA, if you ask me; incidently they are pretty good at that too).
Carrion Woods is an excellent tool *early* in the game. Later on the effectis minimal and even hampering (your population keeps dieing, and you really would need the tax-money for more of your dryad hoplites and black centaurs). But before others have massed evocations available, and especially in the not-so missile-troop-infested EA and MA, massed manikin mixed with massed maenads rock. So, in LA you can't get CW up early enough and you won't have the synergy with maeanads.
As it is now in CBM1.6, Carrion Woods is perhaps not worth going for; in EA or MA you can get it up on 18 (unless you get lucky with nature sites and/or random gem events), in LA you can't get it up until year three. It would be better IMO if CW was only available for LA Pangaea but at a reduced cost, as it would make thematically sense; being able to cast CW in year three makes absolutely no sense in my opinion, as by then you'd much rahter get up Mother Oak and Gift of Health. I seriously doubt anybody would seriously claim Carrion Woods is as good as Mother Oak and Gift of Health *combined*, but that is the situation where CW is in CBM 1.6
Re: Conceptual Balance Mod 1.6
Linear Mode
