Super-Casting Pretenders?

[Taqwus]

The one obvious issue would be -- how much are you giving up for that level of magic? Two nines is usually pretty expensive, although some combos are more affordable than others due to the pretender selection.
It can work, and you can get some outrageous blessing combinations (Fire 9/Blood 9 would make for ludicrously offensive-minded Lava Warriors in addition to being thematic; although the Blood 9 blessing likely isn't worth going past 8), but whether it'll help depends on things like size of map, indy strength, sacred unit types et al.

[SelfishGene]

Well blessing effects would certainly have to be considered when building a caster pretender, but the point was to make a god whom could dish out enough spell damage to take on armies and significantly win battles like a SC.

Because fatigue are casters' main obstacle stupidly high magic levels can significantly reduce fatigue gain. Fire Darts and Falling Fires are -20 skills that are reduced to -7 with 9 Fire.

Pretender archtypes seem to want to be grouped into a few catagories. Pure combat like the Nataraja and combat/caster hybrids like the Dragons. Titan-esque, most of whom are physically powerful early on but lack strength and combat potential enough to be true SC and late game powerhouses. Humanoid types that lack any sort of physical abilities but have cheap magic. And Caster-Pretenders whom lack the strength of the Titans but have better magic skills.

The trouble with standard Titan builds are that unless you max them for 9 bless effects their casting abilities are rather limited to one or two big bLasts at the start of a battle. My 5 Earth 5 Nature Great Mother can only cast Destruction 2 times before fatiguing out of combat, which not only ruins her as a caster but also as a fighter.

The idea with the caster-pretender is to make a god that can really bLast away with medium level spells for most of the battle before fatiguing out. Rejuv items will still be necessary but i think even at 9 as many +path items that you can stack as well.

[Sindai]

The first game of Dominions 2 I actually won was with just such a pretender.

Abysia, Moloch with Fire 10. Desert Eye. I threw him into the Deathmatch Arena and he won the Trident, allowing him to cast two spells per turn. Even before I got "Falling Fires," the guy could massacre 100+ unit armies by himself. By the end of the game he had over 600 personal kills. Good times.

Of course, I wasn't playing with Atlantis or R'ylegh, but that was intentinoal, since this was only my second game ever I tried to set it up to be as easy as I could.

[Truper]

Try a Lord of the Desert Sun sometime if you want a fire caster with some accuracy. Eagle eyes does the job...

[Norfleet]

The primary drawback I find with "caster" pretenders is that their use is far more limited than straightforward SCs: An SC can kick *** for a good 50 rounds of combat. A caster can only cast 5 spells. Assuming that a few of them are devoted to buffs designed to keep him from becoming a road waffle, that leaves very little to actually bLasting the crap out of people. While the spellcasting unit AI is certainly better than any other game of this type, it's most decidedly NOT geared towards solo-unit commando operations, and thus cannot be counted on not to do anything completely inappropriate in this case.

[archaeolept]

Well, I just tried out a "super caster" phoenix pretender (F9A9), and he seemed quite decent. provided some artillery support in the early expansion, then retired back to base in order to get research under way (playing c'tis w/ drain 3).

then, after research gets kicked into high gear, he re-emerged as a kick-*** dominion defender - any incursion, and he could respond w/ extreme prejudice - sulpher cloud, fire cloud, orb lightning, etc...

Plus, by then w/ an eye of aiming he had a 30 precision

And the serpent dancers worked reasonably well w/ the blessings, though really the 75% lightning resistence is more of a multiplayer sort of thing.

[mivayan]

A 4-6 fire&air phoenix is fun to use with standard marignon since they start with the holy pyre spell which is fairly effective against most indies.