I suck with Pythium ... please help!

[Thufir]

Huzurdaddi said:

I'm going to do my usual expansion with principes who are etherial. It hurts your research since you have to send out 3-5 casters with your army but it seems to make a decent sized difference.

How do you do that? Are you saying 3-5 theurgs, casting body ethereal, placed in and around a principe squad, will make it mostly ethereal?

That does sounds like a neat idea for early game - I'll have to try that next time I play Pythium.

[KroolDeath]

I also have a question about this Body Ethereal thing on the Principe's, and I'm probably going to go off topic a second.

I have seen this mentioned before, perhaps even in this thread, and I am confused about casting Body Ethereal on troops as I would assume the caster would cast it on himself.

What the heck am I missing here? And I just started playing Pythium in one of the newb games so this is of great interest to me.

Krool

[Yossar]

Body ethereal has range one so he can cast it on any adjacent units. If he's next to a large pretender, he'll always cast it on him first. Not sure about other troops.

[Huzurdaddi]

How do you do that? Are you saying 3-5 theurgs, casting body ethereal, placed in and around a principe squad, will make it mostly ethereal?

Yep. Place your principes in a block and sprinkle 3-5 thurges/theurg acos in the block and script x3 body etherial, and set the principies on hold and attack and when they start moving most of them will be etherial.

Or place 10 principes with each thrurg/theurg aco and place the theurg in the middle of the 10 man block and script x3 body etherial and boom you have lots of small blocks of etherial troops.

They are quite good at smashing indeps. Not as good as an SC, but darn good. After a good number of indeps you will have some seriously experienced principes, defence 17 here I come.

[archaeolept]

it is a nice trick. the problem, of course, is the cost of the theurgs, and the lost research this involves.

as well, as there isn't a "hold and fire" command, you can't script the principes to lead w/ a couple javelin tosses.

I'm not sure which is better. Probably, against very high level indeps, I'd go w/ the ethereal when backed by a bit of artillery. Against normal indeps, the principes generally do just fine on their own.

[Arralen]

If you set them to "hold and attack", they'll fire at everything that comes in range. Which is not that great, sadly. So if placed forward enough, you might one lucky shot in before melee begins. If you use big enough stacks, those units in the rear actually fire at the nearby enemy while the front line is fighting.

[Huzurdaddi]

it is a nice trick. the problem, of course, is the cost of the theurgs, and the lost research this involves.

The reason I always thought it worked nicely for Pythium is the nice cheap Acolyte. He gets the job done and at the cost of 5 or so principes, less if you count maintainance.

[Boron]

Arralen said:
If you set them to "hold and attack", they'll fire at everything that comes in range. Which is not that great, sadly. So if placed forward enough, you might one lucky shot in before melee begins. If you use big enough stacks, those units in the rear actually fire at the nearby enemy while the front line is fighting.

Yeah i hate this too . Same with vanheim e.g. . I lost more valkieries because of throwing javelins from huskarls/vans then on indies .

Sometimes the javelins can be quite helpful e.g. when a barbarian horde stops just before you and all fire and the barbarians rout then . But normally you get more casualities through friendly fire by this then enemy kills .

Once you reach alteration 6 you can replace the body etheral by false horror spamming .
Really good against the Last indies / not too big player forces with normal morale like 10-15 .

If you scout earlygame you can give a player some trouble by casting a few call of the winds on his provinces and putting taxes to 200% + evading his main force .

I normally don't invest much in pd only 1 pd but later castles . So do a lot of other players too . So with a bit luck you can earlygame give an opponent some trouble . You need to time it cause it works only for 1-2 turns , after this the enemy will built higher pd
But as preparation for war when made properly on turn 10-20 this can prevent the enemy from building troops for 5-10 turns and perhaps even lead to upkeep problems .


Summoning can be a problem with pythium cause your mages can't summon much . So you have to carefully design your pretender according .

With 2.13 harbingers / archangels are a bit valorised .
I guess they will be a good competitor then for the role as good thug with banelords .

Pythium has imo a really good earlygame expansion rate cause you don't need to search provinces and can do this by accashic later .
So you can expand with your SC , first 1 later 2 theurg + principle squads .