I suck with Pythium ... please help!

Huzurdaddi · #1 September 9th, 2004, 12:14 AM

Oh and I am playing Pythium in my most recent game ( Boron's game on mosehansen ).

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.

After that I can switch to mind-burn/Smite based armies for a few turns and then to soul slay armies. That should Last until turn 25-30. Assuming I live that long. But indeps are set somewhat high so I hope that most people will be happy killing them for a while.

The question is what to do after that. I guess you have to rush to AQ ( which probably means getting them before this point ). I really don't know what to do.

Thufir · #2 September 9th, 2004, 12:19 AM

Quote:

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 · #3 September 9th, 2004, 12:39 AM

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 · #4 September 9th, 2004, 01:23 AM

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 · #5 September 9th, 2004, 01:37 AM

Quote:

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 · #6 September 9th, 2004, 02:01 AM

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 · #7 September 9th, 2004, 02:29 AM

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.