Pretender, awake, dormant or imprisoned?

[Taqwus]

Super-combatant. Refers to a powerful commander designed for crunching through mundane troops with ease, usually through one or more of

* a very strong base unit type
* good equipment (usually including one or more of luck, antimagic, ethereal, reinvigoration, life draining, regeneration, quickness, high damage, high prot, high def)
* buffing magic (ex. casting spells to increase luck, speed, et al before joining the fray)

ex. Son of Niefel is already a formidable giant; given good equipment he's even more brutal. OTOH, a Crone is normally not slaying masses in melee combat.

[Mortibus]

Oh okay, I've used my Kraken like that. I need that "amulet of the fish" to really see how he does against a serious army on land, but so far he's eating tritons like popcorn.

[NTJedi]

Mortibus said:
Oh okay, I've used my Kraken like that. I need that "amulet of the fish" to really see how he does against a serious army on land, but so far he's eating tritons like popcorn.

Not sure if you're playing single player games or multiplayer games, but computer opponents have a really tough time expanding into water provinces. If you're finding the game too easy you can switch to one of the land nations.

[Mortibus]

Single player, and I like sitting in the water and hiding, thank you very much!

I'm still figuring the game out... just realized I've wasted my time researching blood magic, for instance. Also, I researched construction to the maximum before learning that all I needed for an Amulet of the Fish was a little air magic and construction 4.

I'm not quite ready to embarrass myself in multiplayer yet, give me a week.

[Boron]

Hm i mainly use 3 kinds of pretenders:

Awake dragon, for speeding up expansion and often with lvl 9 for the bless too if i have useful bless troops.

Works well with nations like mictlan or vanheim.

Imprisioned oracle or fob for uberbless, cool for rushes. E.g. Mictlan f9w9b6 FoB.

Dormant SC god, like the risen oracle. When you have researched your first buffs you have your god then too and the 150 extra points give you 3 more scales .
As SC god i only pick immortals, the other SC gods are imho too fragile now in Dom3.
The immortal SC god dies too, but because he is immortal it is not problematic then. And if he wiped out 50% of the emeny army before dying he did a good job .

[Cainehill]

Dragons? They seem to suck a la pre CB mods ( a lot of pretenders seem to be once again massive suckage, or massive bonus - look at WItch King). I've found a couple of pretenders that rock for awake pretenders though to speed up the early conquering.

[KissBlade]

Agreed. Low dominion, high path cost, + the extra points you need to make a dragon awakened, dragons are REALLY on the low end of desirable pretenders here.

[Boron]

Eh dragons seem to suck maybe, but Kiss and Caine, keep in mind the doubled research costs and how difficult it is to get your 2nd castle.

So the dragon is i think the only pretender that can go on expansion on turn 2.

Fireshield is enchantment 3 now. For a GK you need imho fireshield and ironskin, that is 2x level 3 research, that takes quite a bit to be researched, 2x 200 rp.
Also the GK is a bit nerfed, only 2 dominion and 120 points.

Also taking the lvl 9 bless for your dragon is somewhat affordable.
Imho the dragon is a good chassis.

[Nerfix]

Cainehill said:

Dragons? They seem to suck a la pre CB mods ( a lot of pretenders seem to be once again massive suckage, or massive bonus - look at WItch King). I've found a couple of pretenders that rock for awake pretenders though to speed up the early conquering.

What's this Witch King you speak of?

[Cainehill]

Nerfix said:

What's this Witch King you speak of?

Ghost King, whatever