Quote:
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.
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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.
Re: MA Pangaea strategies
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