[edit: this was written for CBM 1.7, with no hammers or sanguine rods]
LA Pythium is a nation that seems to confuse a lot of people. The problem, I think, is that it gives the impression of being all over the place and lacking focus. There are no obvious straightforward strengths like you see with most nations. When I look at them though, what I see is a beast out the gate with massive versatility waiting for a bit of polish to have the capability to attack strongly along dozens of different vectors and appallingly daunting defensive capabilities. A strong hand and some vision is required to keep them focussed and show the opposition why all roads lead to Pythium. LA Pythium is the last era of the Roman empire, and nobody has managed to tell them they yet that they don’t rule the world.
First off, the legion. LA Pythium’s infantry is second to no human infantry in the game. Sure, there are some that do better in a specific niche, but for a well rounded, use in every situation non sacred front line I can’t think of any that are superior. Beautiful tower shields leave them immune to archery (and several spells). Great defense and solid protection give them top marks for survivability. Broad swords with good attack and strength give a very respectable offense. A reasonable price tag means ranks after ranks of them. You’ve even got a fairly tough and effective standard bearer if morale is ever a problem (pity that idiot pretender who tried to rush you with his awe!) Needless to say, you shouldn’t have any trouble whatsoever stomping all over the indies with very economical squads. Use one squad of 4 hydras and your starting troops (in two different armies!) to clear the indies around your capital and you should have plenty of resources to flood very economical expansion squads of Comitatense at that point. Bring the hydras in to take out any tough indies, and surprisingly small squads of Comitatense can clear out the lighter stuff.
This is good, because much more than most nations LA Pythium’s strength relies on having many castles. We’ll get into this more in a minute, but while we’re still on the infantry it’s important to point out that everything you can recruit outside your capital is map move one. Well, you can recruit indies which is important to remember as heavy cav/knights (as well as some of the more exotic stuff) will help considerably in your maneuverability so keep an eye on what’s available. Also, keep in mind that having production scales does not mean you need to max the troops pumping out of every one of your castles. What we’re aiming for is considerably more capacity than you’re actually using – otherwise you’ll stall out well short of the castles you want. Once you’ve got castles sprouting like mushrooms with solid production scales though, that map move 1 doesn’t hurt quite as bad because you can rapidly build up forces at most points in your empire. It takes a bit of discipline, but you really do need to stop producing troops once you’ve got enough indie clearers and dump all your gold into castles. It’s also a good idea to hold off on buying Snake Priests for awhile, you won’t need them until you’ve got a bit of research going and won’t rely on having a huge number of them anyway. Spend a couple turns producing nothing but an 80 gold Renata while your economical troops sweep out the indies and your gold will pile up very quickly to be immediately transformed into castles.
A big part of the reason you want all those castles, of course, is because you’ve got a bunch of nice cheap mages. Now, your mages paths *are* all over the place, and there are a couple combinations you’ll land that just aren’t terribly useful, but remember you’ll pretty much always need researchers. Send the nice ones into the field or the forges and put the others in the library.
Before I get into the specific mages I’ll tip my hand and say that I have a hard time thinking of a pretender that could benefit LA Pythium more than a forge lord. Much, much nastiness is just barely outside the grasp of your mages and boosters are your lifeblood. You’ve got mages who with no more than one booster can remote site search every path in the game (admittedly, the A booster is a stretch) so once you get into mid game you should really have a pretty solid gem income across the board. The nice news is you don’t really need help early on, take a sleeping or imprisoned forge lord and pass out gems instead of boosters if you’re really pinched. Many of your mages are sacred so take at least E4 and you’ll be wanting cheap rings so at least S4 – I lay out several suggestions for RoS, at 20S pile up a few. You’ll also be wanting to spend those sleeping/imprisoned points on picking up a bit of D and possibly N.
You’ll want to skip the Mystes completely, but all your other mages have a welcome spot on your roster. Now a note on the heretics, you are going to want to pay attention to where masses of them are. They will knock out your dominion out, which on top of other considerations will render positive magic scales pointless for research. For this reason it’s a good idea to separate out your heretic and non heretical research centers. Don’t really worry about it outside large research piles, use whoever you want in your armies so long as you’re not fighting off a strong dominion push – in which case those heretics are quite useful.
Renata – 80 gold, sacred with 5 rp in magic 1 scales. These gals are going to be a solid support corps and your most cost efficient researchers who won’t fizzle your magic scales out. They’re also going to bring the cold when that’s the angle that’s called for, though they won’t be your default battlemages.
WW – frozen heart, numbness, cleansing water, grip of winter, wolven winter, ice pebble staffs, boots of quickness, water bottles
WS – communion slaves
WD - research
WN - research
Heliodromus – 50% of them are F2, and with phoenix power can drop those nice fire evos, heat from hell and fire fend (brings your Solaris infantry up to 100% fire immunity). With a half priced fire helm and fire skull firestorm is within reach – which lets you do a reasonable Aby impression.
FF – fire evos
FN – fire skulls give eagle eyes + fire evos. Otherwise heretic research
Epoptes –Your sole access to E magic. Seems paltry at just level one E, but you don’t need a lot of earth boots plus earth power to get a lot of utility out of it. A little E goes a long way. These ladies bring your infantry up to a whole new level.
NN – Sleep cloud, wooden warriors. Charm spam with a mace
NE – earth boots + earth power + eagle eyes. Destruction, blade wind, strength of giants, weapons of sharpness. Iron warriors (hydras), marble warriors. Iron bane (more on that in a minute). With a bit of effort you can drop Gia’s blessing which brings those mad mofo infantry straight through the game as fairly badass.
Renatus – with the obvious poison slant of the theme skellispam seems like the obvious angle, but I don’t really buy it. Only 25% of them can raise the dead, and they are only one of many mages you’ll be recruiting so you won’t have a pile of them. Even those that can will only cast it a couple times before passing out. Skellispam is all about critical mass, and you’re really not playing to your strengths to force it out of Renatus. That’s not to say there’s no place for skellispam, just not out of the Renatus. You will want to rotate undead into your forces to leverage cold and poison though, so think spirit mastery, banes, and manikins. For heavier D lifting you’ll mostly be leaning on llamia queens.
DD – shadow blast, disintegrate, skull mentors, banes, bane lords
SD – communion slaves, nether darts. Cap & ring give you VotD spam.
WD – research
DN – manikins (a nasty surprise when they’re unexpected)
Reveler – these guys are an important investment. The ones you really care about are the ones with a blood random, but there are certainly uses for the other 75% of them. The 25% with a N random are great for sleep cloud spam and sport a 40 leadership. The 50% who don’t get a random could be fairly miserable dead weight - they’re inefficient researchers as they heretically nix your magic scales yielding a non sacred 110 gold for 3 rp. Any research is good research, but for my money you’ll get more use out of them scripting eagle eyes and passing them a good bow while using them to herd troops. A half dozen high precision bows of war will thin out a lot of opposition who didn’t think you had any archers, while piercers or ethereal xbows will keep the enemy heavy hitters stepping lively and banefire xbows will ruin plenty of guy’s days. Still a tad expensive, but figure that cost into what you get out of the B randoms and they’re very much worth it. You’ll want to steadily invest in them to slowly build up your blood economy and Get It On. Just one bloodhunting province with 4 or 5 bloodhunters will let you spam orgy with every other blood random you get and still pile up the bloodslaves. The orgy may seem ineffective at first, I mean who needs a handful of maenads, right? The thing is, their growth is exponential. After a couple years you’ll be spawning dozens of free maenads per turn. Nowhere near EA Pangea numbers, but plenty enough to be useful. All those castles you cranked out? They’re looking pretty difficult to siege now. You can also pretty comfortably field a couple hundred maenads to fight under that iron bane you dropped (you didn’t think that was for use with your infantry, did you?)
So what do you do with those blood slaves that are piling up? First thing, empower your blood hunters to B2. This will roughly double the blood slaves each is pulling in, so it doesn’t take that long to pay for itself. In not that long you’ll find yourself with something resembling a real blood economy while generating a hundred free maenads per turn. Now, obviously there’s lots of useful stuff to do with blood slaves, but in this situation one angle stands out to me. Give those satyrs some teeth and build up a very powerful assassin corps.
Assassins with a lifelong protection and a cheap ranged weapon are a considerable threat to most anybody from bodyguarded mages to SCs. Obviously they won’t be killing everything in the game, but there are huge swaths of appropriate targets – particularly the double protected satyrs popping out 4 imps per turn with 15 defense. Just one surprise mass assassination can often be a war winner whether you cripple a critical army before a big fight or wipe out the support group at home destroying boosters and pretenders. Even if your opponent anticipates and pre-counters you, you’ll considerably limit the strategies that are available to him. Not many raiding thugs or SCs can cope with the neverending imps. Light bodyguards won’t cut it, you’ve got to use expensive elite bodyguards which dramatically increase the cost if you’re using them on all your commanders. Even skellispamers – generally the bane of assassins don’t have a chance. Don’t neglect to equip your assassins appropriately on top of the imps for what they’re facing. Ice pebble staffs, scepters of authority, fire bola, piercers, thunder bows, herald staffs, water bottles are all great ideas to finish off the tougher guys while your imps just keep them busy.
Therugs – communicant masters that get you the heavy buffs & enchantments. With a modest 4 slaves + power of the spheres you get A4, W4, S5 before any boosters. – Storm, wrathful skies, fog warriors, mass flight, quickening, will of the fates, etc. Not much to say because of the obvious power synergized with your awesome infantry, don’t let my lack of verbiage suggest they aren’t important.
Serpent priest – your signature mage, and they do some heavy lifting. The obvious angle is foul vapors, and of course they do this well. To really leverage it though you need some stuff to tie up the bad guys while they turn green and croak. The obvious thing is skellispam, but as I mentioned above Renatus just don’t cut it. There is another option though which the forge lord makes fairly economical, and that’s skullfaces. Use a second Serpent priest to buff quickness and each 12D skullface will spit out 10 skellies per turn, slap in a heart of life and just 2 or 3 are fairly overwhelming (as well as giving you 100% poison resistance when buffed by poison ward). Over a hundred undead before melee is joined, another hundred before those hundred can be killed…it’s overwhelming even without any other support – though there’s no reason to do that.
WNNN – foul vapors, mass regen, mass protection, charm
WNND – mace + RoS + moonvine = Llamia queens (get you up into vamp lords to do lots of new fun stuff with your blood economy)
WNNS – moonvine, curse, Sirrush
WWNN = dragon master + ice drakes (plenty of hps to resist poison and wrathful skies)
Putting it all together
On the Northern front the wooden skinned legion is nigh unstoppable with their magically sharp weapons and on the verge of adding regeneration and mistform while the Will of the Fates themselves protect them.
On the Western front the fire immune legion fights under heat from hell as the heavens pour down fires, and will shortly bring firestorms to cover all their battlefields.
To the East ice drakes pummel the empires foes from behind never ending waves of undead, battlefields choked by noxious fumes and stiffening under the grip of winter while weighed down under thick waves of sleep clouds.
To the south waves of screaming maenads flow out, the armor of their foes falling useless to the ground while a hailstorm of absurdly precise arrows carpet the ground in front of their advance.
Off in the far East squads of ethereal, iron skinned, quickened hydras terrorize the countryside, hitting like a jackhammer those who can resist their poison and fear auras.
In the far West desperate troops try to break through buffed Sirrush as wrathful skies blast their formations apart.
Everywhere the enemies of the empire are found dead in their bedrolls come the morning, thousands of imp claw marks mutilating their bodies.
Any foolish enough to siege one of the empires castles find the walls repaired by near limitless maenads while swarms of satyrs decimate the leadership, the vengeance of the dead picking off those who manage to escape the imps. Very few get to witness to horror of attempting to storm through the gates as virtually every manner of unpleasantness known to man pours down upon them. Do they prep for cold? Fire? Poison? Or are they “fortunate” enough to just have to go toe to toe with the heavily enchanted legion?
The SCs who manage to emerge from a pile of imps and vengeance find themselves attempting to wade through tough opposition while bombarded by charm and disintegrate. Those who frustrate these attempts must content with bane lord anti-thugs and quickened manikin/mandragoras.
S P Q R - long live the empire!
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