Pangaea advice

[WraithLord]

try to take a look at the nation overview each turn, with units off, just to check the unrest & taxes in each one. When unrest starts getting to 20, I start thinking about dropping the taxes. If unrest is over 30, I drop taxes to 0 until unrest is 0 again.

That's some great advice. thanks.

How about a bless strategy?
I tried the carrion dragon with 9 picks of nature and death.
I tested my blessed centaurs in battle and they were awesome.

But maybe the medusa can give a better bless with nature and earth or maybe I can go for a rainbow mage for both site search and lesser bless effects of all paths.
Did anyone try going for bless pretender?

[Teraswaerto]

Lord of Fertility with Nature 10 gives White Centaurs Berserker +7 (or 6 if you go with only Nature 9), which is pretty nice, and it doesn't cost a fortune either.

[Huzurdaddi]

How about a bless strategy?

Never tried it, but W9 with the white Centaurs looks pretty good. A definite mid-top range bless troop. I'm just saying water since their defence is what stands out ( this will get reduced by beserk, *sigh*).

Anyway they are home province so I don't know if I would base my strategy around them.

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Huzurdaddi:

quote:

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How about a bless strategy?

Never tried it, but W9 with the white Centaurs looks pretty good. A definite mid-top range bless troop. I'm just saying water since their defence is what stands out ( this will get reduced by beserk, *sigh*).

Anyway they are home province so I don't know if I would base my strategy around them.

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That was one of my issues with the Black Centaurs, since the only real bless strategies I've had with Pan are with CW. Capitol only, on a large map it's tough to get them where they're needed (unless / until you get to the "Walking hand in hand through the forests" spell).

Tough and effective, but not something I could see building a strategy around, not like Battle Vestals, Flagellants, Jotuns, etc.

[alexti]

In the early game Pangaea has a very good unit - centaur warrior and the expansion phase will mostly rely on centaur warriors and pretender. The major Pangaea weakness is poor research and lack of offensive magic. To compensate for that I would suggest magic+2 which will make a passable researcher from dryad (5p for 110 gold and you're getting level-3 priests with it). Pans are very expensive and they will take most of your income, so it's better to rely on summons later. I usually mix lamias for survivability, Vine Ogres for a meat shield and various (weak and strong) undead. This is in line with poor research, because you only need conjuration and construction to setup good summon production. Ivy Kings and Lamia Queens are optimal for nature chain-summons. Lamia Queens will also give you an access to death magic and astral magic. Later on you can summon few demiliches to do your further undead summoning.

I wouldn't rely on maenads, because in MP most will be playing order, and you would like to have order in your empire too, because of your costly mages. Hoplites are decent troops, but they're slow and their time of usability is quite short. Plus they cost upkeep. Same applies to armored minotaurs. So I would sacrifice productivity and take sloth-3.

So the scales come to Order+3/Prod-3/Luck-2/Magic+2. To further increase income and somewhat compensate for poor productivity I'd take castle.

This leaves plenty of points to build a pretender. There're 2 goals here: cover missing magic paths and create good SC to help early expansion. The good choice here is infamous vampire queen. Something like fire-2,air-3,water-2,earth-1,death-3,blood-3. This will give you good indy conquerer with alteration-3, "almost" rainbow mage for site searching, plus an item forger.

I wasn't taking infamous VQ myself, trying to find some other good pretender, but whatever I've tried, VQ would be better. Even if you don't want to take VQ, pretender should probably be build along those lines.

[HJ]

From my (limited) experience:
If you take strong turmoil (3), you'll be getting more maenads by the midgame than you can spend or effectively ship to the front with just 5-6 pans in the capitol. The question is wheter you'll survive until then, but if you do, you'll have to recruit a hierophant every turn just to get them out of there, and have an ever-flowing stream of reinforcements.
Centaurs and regular minotaurs can make a short work of any regular army, but it's essential that you have something to soak up the arrows and inital shock, and maenads are good for this since they are free, abundant and don't rout easily regardless of high casualties. Another alternative would be revelers, which are cheap and still won't rout easily, and which you'll be able to afford quite a lot if you take order - forget about regular satyrs if you don't want to pick them up in the neighbouring provinces after each battle.
I have had good results with using fire 9 blessing with white centaurs, due to their speed and overall high stats. This means that they will be able to reach the back lines quickly and make a short work of anything that's there. Even if they do get hit, which is not too likely (high def, prot, mr for a recruitable unit, particulary of such speed), they'll go berserk and get the job done.
Since I almost exclusively played regular Pangaea with high turmoil, the armored troops (cataphracts, hoplites, war minos) didn't fit in well, so I have nothing too good to say about them. If you want to play with them, however, my suggestion would be to take New Era instead of the default anyway.
You can also try sneaky tactics with your whole armies, but maenads that make the bulk of my armies cannot sneak, so I generally didn't employ sneaking much. If you go with reveler option, however, this is more viable, as you'll have armies composed of recruited stealthy units for raiding - even serious raiding if you manage to sneak in with centaurs.
Another cool thing with Pangaea are the hierophants. They are cheap, able commanders and priests to boot, have good precision, and if you hit a pan with random in air or indie mages with air, give them longbows of accuracy for some added fun.
Blood and crossbreeding are useful at the beginning, since you'll probably take luck if you took turmoil (and this is not nearly as bad as it used to be), but blood hunting is expensive for Pangaea, the cost of Pandemoniacs being a bit prohibitive.
And, as a Last note, be weary of the fire-using nations, since the 6th spell your pans and dryads are going to cast will alomst invariably be protection or mass protection. Minotaurs make lovely torches after that.

Cheers,

[ June 01, 2004, 01:24: Message edited by: HJ ]

[Vynd]

I wouldn't go for a bless strategy with Pangaea, since they only have the one sacred combat unit. But if I did go with a bless strategy, I definitely wouldn't use the nature blessing that some have suggested, since it will make your Dryads, Pans, an Hierophants into berserkers rather than the spell casters you mostly want them to be. And your sacred centaurs already have basic berserking anyway.