Good Pretender design for Marverni?

[Graeme Dice]

Wish_For_Blood_Slaves said:
with marveni you want a sage, and this is why: its not about recruitable troops - clearly they are sub par, but the mages are POWERFUL, so you want some decent evocation and at higher construction levels they can make decent Golem thugs/SCs and armies of mechanical men.

I can't think of any reason that having a sage would help towards this end. The 20 research points he provides is two turns of mage recruitment, and if he's researching, you are expanding half as fast as you would be with a 50 point wyrm.

Give him a little death and he might even be able to replace himself with skull mentors then go around looking for magic sites to power the marveni machine.

He's going to find a bunch of sites that you won't be able to use with your national mages, and since he can only forge one item per turn, you're never going to be able to make good use of a rainbow mage.

[Aleph]

Can we talk a little more about Prince of Death design? I've definitely had an awake Dom 10 Death 5 PoD take out a couple groups of indeps singlehandedly before items or research, but it seemed like he might have gotten spanked if I'd been less lucky. Would you think sleeping, to get more points and give people time to get a little construction action going, or just throw him out there solo from the get go and hope for the best?

[Shovah32]

I often set him sleeping to buy some extra scales and give me a chance to forge some basic armour or weaponry

[KissBlade]

He doesn't need anything. ESpecially for expanding into the crappier indies. Later on you can research and forge some armor + luck pendant.

[Shovah32]

Yes crappier indies are easier. I tend to play with indies set to 8-9 and,even vrs fairly weak enemies, he tends to pick up a few afflictions in the first few turns which is why i like to get some armour on him.

[Wish]

heres what I ran recently that really worked - he could take nearly anything but cavalry.

PoD, 9 dom (10 is too dang expensive,) 4 water 4 earth 3 death, juggle scales to your liking.

the water and earth are for increased defense and protection. (he has a little of both already, but the extra +4 to both really helps round him out.)

on turn 2 you have enough to make a black iron breastplate - do so and send him out on turn 3. he is at somewhere around 23-24 prot, and since he flies he can really clean up all the tribes and infantries.

after a little research upgrade his weapon to maybe a frost brand (for AoE) and give him a shield. At some point you can have him casting invulnerability and soul vortex, so you can swap out his armor for a robe of shadows.

it works out pretty good.

[Potatoman]

Why is soul vortex worth casting on a guy that doesn't generate fatigue? The extra 1 damage/healing per turn seems pretty useless.

[Graeme Dice]

Soul vortex affects a rather large area surrounding the caster, you can never have too much healing, and there are multiple ways to cause fatigue to zero encumbrance units.

[Wish]

well, to eat up the fatigue caused by casting invulnerability

[KissBlade]

In Rpg's, we call it "Crowd control" =).