Is Pangea - Carrion Woods balanced?

[Kristoffer O]

Puppet mastery works, but it doesn't show on the stats. It reduces the cost to move by half (IIRC) and doesn't affect the AP's of the beast. Increased AP would give more attacks as well and the spell is only intended to make the critters move quicker. Therefore it might be difficult to notice the effects of the spell.

Place a couple of horse-carrion at the flanks or rear and have them attack rear. They move incredibly fast when enchanted.

[Yossar]

Mandragoras make incredible SC killers. They do have other vulnerabilities and take a while to acchieve sufficient numbers, though.

[Cainehill]

CW's problem is that their troops, while fairly effective, almost all have very low protection and defense, and no shields. This means that they usually take high casualties, especially against archers and battle mages.

On the other hand - given enough numbers, they do handle things like knights and heavy cavalry fairly well; probably 2 to 4 carrion critters dies for each knight, which compares well to most normal units.

They do generate enough carrion dogs and other high movement creatures to serve as effective cavalry, especially with Puppet Mastery.

CW does take some ... management of the troops. Given that the first carrion critters to reach the enemy are going to die (especially against cavalry and such), you want to put your lesser carrion in the first wave - normal manikins, carrion chickens, carrion piglets, etc. This way they take the brunt of the initial losses, conserving the more valuable carrion.

Another way to spruce up the carrion bunnies is to add some vine men / vine ogres. Forge a Vine Crown and a Treelords staff and one dryad can summon 4 vine ogres for 1 nature gem. (Skip the staff and she can get ... 3 vine men? Or 2?) The nice thing about the vine walkers is that they don't have any upkeep and don't eat, just like your carrion, but they in effect dissipate the effect of banishment.

It also takes some management and creativity to gear up the gem income and research needed. Nature gems are best used for generating your carrion lords (who are best used to reanimate), rather than carrion ladies or centaurs. (The carrion chicks are okay for research, given that they have no upkeep, but there are better ways to go.)

So - since CW also has death mages and income, you want to ... generate undead mages. If you don't find sages or some other high value researchers to recruit (sparingly because CW has a cash flow problem), then revenants can be very cost effective, especially since a skull staff allows a revenant to summon more revenants. Another thing to do is use some of those death gems to build Skull Mentors - 10 death gems for an extra 9 research is pretty cost effective, even more so if you can get a dwarven hammer or two along the way.

Of course, to _get_ the dwarven hammer, and other decent forgings and summonings, I find you need to go with a fairly broad range of magic on the pretender - I like to have Earth 4 as well as Nature and Death at least 3, and preferably 1 or 2 more elements at 3 or higher. (Not the other sorceries - having to use a pretender to blood hunt isn't very effective, and Astral - well, Astral would be okay on an immortal Pretender. )

The broad range of magic allows the pretender to find magic sites CW would otherwise miss, many of which give recruitable mages, and allows some of the mid to high level items and rituals to be handled by the pretender.

In addition, even without any magic on the pretender, CW can eventually get some decent mages via death and nature, and will need to : spectres and mound kings from death, Lamia Queens from nature, which will eventually be able to summon Couatls for Astral magic.

Along the way, CW definately does need a bit of luck in finding magic sites. It's definately not an overpowered theme, but it can be fun and can give some of the other nations a run for their divinity.

[odd_enuf]

actually, other then a holy 4 prophit, carrion lord and ladies reanimate roughly the same number of critters. I did a test on this once, reanimating in provinces with no dominion for 10 turns, if I remeber corectly centairs averaged 3-5, ladies and lords 13-15, and the holy 4 prophit 32. This is becuase the formula divides the unholy power in half and rounds down. so 2 and 3 have the same value. So use revenats for reseach, ladies to reanimate, and lords to lead the armies, giving a lord a crystal shield if you can forge one will help alot too, letting you cast the best unholy spells. As for the centairs, they can be used to round up the auto spawns, but not much else.

odd_enuf

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by odd_enuf:
actually, other then a holy 4 prophit, carrion lord and ladies reanimate roughly the same number of critters. I did a test on this once, reanimating in provinces with no dominion for 10 turns, if I remeber corectly centairs averaged 3-5, ladies and lords 13-15, and the holy 4 prophit 32. This is becuase the formula divides the unholy power in half and rounds down. so 2 and 3 have the same value. So use revenats for reseach, ladies to reanimate, and lords to lead the armies, giving a lord a crystal shield if you can forge one will help alot too, letting you cast the best unholy spells. As for the centairs, they can be used to round up the auto spawns, but not much else.

Interesting - I never did tests with the ladies vice lords, though I did know there was some question whether the lord was better than the lady, because of rounding.

I definately agree about the centaurs - okay for rounding up spawns, but the enchantment-2 Mound King has seemed like a better deal for 3 death gems, albeit they can't reanimate while defending temples the way a centaur can.

I still prefer the carrion lords to the ladies though - huge HPs for a mage (52?), and their N3 magic makes them much more worthwhile in combat and out, imo. Being able to cast Mend the Dead is very nice also, as they can heal themselves, the carrion elephants, and also the Carrion Dragon pretender very well.

Glad to hear the Unholy 4 Prophet reanimates so well - I've been trying to get my prophet killed off in one game to make a Carrion Lord the pretender, but in the meantime, planted the Sword of Injustice on one and set him to reanimating at unholy 4.

Which reminds me - my feeling is that it's best to make the initial centaur commander the prophet right away, in order to reanimate, to help push dominion, and also so he can lead carrion critters. If you don't do this, he leads the satyrs, okay, but I've found it unprofitable to recruit normal troops with CW, making him fairly worthless unless you make him the prophet.

(One alternative I've played with is recruiting a Panic Apostate the first turn, making him the Prophet the second. The main benefit to this, imo, is that it has a sizable effect on upkeep, lowering the Pan's ongoing cost by over 10. Money being tight for CW, this helps a lot - since you don't want to 'waste' your pretender by keeping him at home summoning carrion commanders, you need a Pan fairly early.)

After you get going awhile, the centaur doesn't cut it - you'd much rather have a carrion lord (or possibly the ettin hero) for a prophet. Happily, most games the centaur gets killed off before turn 30 or so.

[djtool]

I prefer the lords because the can cast mass protection. You definately get your monies worth out of that one nature gem with that spell.

if its true that ladies summon the same amount as lord though (and have the same chance for the mino's, bears, and behemoths???), then Maybe it's worth the extra gem and loss of troops for one turn to give them a thistle staff.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Originally posted by odd_enuf:
actually, other then a holy 4 prophit, carrion lord and ladies reanimate roughly the same number of critters. I did a test on this once, reanimating in provinces with no dominion for 10 turns, if I remeber corectly centairs averaged 3-5, ladies and lords 13-15, and the holy 4 prophit 32. This is becuase the formula divides the unholy power in half and rounds down. so 2 and 3 have the same value.

That's not what I noticed myself: Pangaean reanimation = unholy power, ie 1 for Centaurs, 2 for Ladies, 3 for Lords, 4 for a prophet Lord.

BTW, if you want to know (without guesswork) how many units you get from the commands 'Reanimate' and 'Summon Allies', or thru passive auto-summoning, put a single unit in the reanimator's first squad. Your new units will appear there instead of in the garrison.