I suck with Pythium ... please help!

[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.

[Kel]

It's reasonably cheap, gold wise, but it will still hurt your early research.

Of course, if it lets you take a high dollar province that you couldn't otherwise, then you can put that towards anothre castle/lab to catch up in research. If it just saves a couple of principes from dying, though...well, let them do their duty and die for the empire

- Kel

[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 .

[Vynd]

The body ethereal thing is nifty. But the principes are quite good in their own right. I wouldn't bother sending a bunch of mages along with them unless I wanted to crack a really tough indy province. And even then my preference would be to just send more principes.

[Huzurdaddi]

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

Ok you got me interested. What have they done to these summons? I did not see it in the patch notes.

The body ethereal thing is nifty. But the principes are quite good in their own right.

I guess it depends upon the indep settings.

[Huzurdaddi]

So I downloaded the patch and I played enough to get a harbringer and I did not notice a change.

What was the change? Does the horn work now or something?