Guide: a difficult Pangaean strategy

[Gandalf Parker]

Keep in mind that my choices are totally based on being able to move the army fast and stealthy. Its true that other choices make sense for local expansion.

However my Pangaea and my Caelum strategies (among others) rely on skipping the more difficult indept provinces and covering the map in a dotted pattern with unconnected provinces. I find that Pangaea does badly if they do the usual march thru the provinces. As soon as they connect to someone, that nation simply marches back thru the provinces Ive taken. Pangaea's PD and purchase power doesnt hold up well altho maybe others can hadle it more efficiently than I can. But putting PD and purchase power into every 3rd province (thats mostly a Caelum rule to allow travel) allows me to stand up fairly well since they are fighting indepts twice for each time they meet me. Of course this is a large map and early game tactic to fight the rush expansion used by others.

Air magic is a good question. I have some Pangaean plans that use air. Especially putting flying boots on Pans. I can quickly put them into someones territory and all they have to do is move around. Its much faster that way. The maenads automatically attack the province each turn even if you moved him that turn. Just moving a pan around forces a nation to invest in PD or maintain multiple moving armies.

But in a choice I prefer being able to give them Black Hearts. Making Pan assassins. That works so cool. I dont have to check to see if I assassinated the last commander so I can attack. Each turn he assassinates, and then tosses maenads that attack the province. On the last commander I automatically take it.

[Windreaper]

Gandalf Parker said:
Keep in mind that my choices are totally based on being able to move the army fast and stealthy. Its true that other choices make sense for local expansion.

Yes, I remember we had a similar discussion couple of years ago. I usually try to find Woodsmen or Villains, cheap and stealthy. I'm kind of interested to know why you prefer Centaur Archers over Centaur Warriors.

I've found I eventually end up fighting some decisive battles and CWs really shine on the flanks - especially if you back them up with some archers to pepper nmy missile troops with arrows.

Good point about the provinces. Btw, Illwinter seems to have done something about the random events, I just started a testbed and get a lot more gold rewards than in Dom2 (or maybe I'm just imagining things). I can understand why one doesn't need to take every single knight/hvy cav (bah, I don't touch those anyway) province with rewards like that.

[Gandalf Parker]

Good point on the warriors. I probably should make more use of the centaur warriors. I should push myself out of my usual purchasing patterns to include it. I think I developed it that way because I was purchasing the things that werent covered by having a maenad frontline during the early expansion, and then I just sent the armies onward on their own. Also I was operating on low money and low resource scales.

I also should make a strong effort to develop a blessed strategy since the white centaur unit is stealth and blessable. Along with white centaur leaders and dryads it could be quite formidable if I can pay for it by taking harsh scales.

There is also the taking harsh scales so that you can stealth-pray them onto others. Pangaea can handle some harsh scales in temperature, lack of food, death, low resource, turmoil, low money and even low magic (though Im not sure if it could survive low luck at the same time) in order to use stealthy priests and shove it at other players. Im not sure if it could be used to win, but it might be used to make sure that cocky "I have the perfect formula" players DONT win. Good for an alliance. Of course the only place to use the points you gain by it would be in a rainbow (many magicked) pretender. That might work nicely into a mega-blessed strategy. Hmmmmmm I might have to explore that concept.

[Boron]

Interesting discussion Gandalf .

Gandalf Parker said:
I also should make a strong effort to develop a blessed strategy since the white centaur unit is stealth and blessable. Along with white centaur leaders and dryads it could be quite formidable if I can pay for it by taking harsh scales.

In blitzes dual blessed white centaurs are very popular.
They usually stealthraid in a similiar way you described above in your strategies and eventually they unite and defeat the enemy main army.

Centaurs and white centaurs are imho very formidable als normal armies too, they are only expensive.

In dom2 Turin and Jeffr very often played Pan in longterm games too, usually with a dualbless.

Because of the higher gold income and some other changes like summonable carrion wood units i think Pan is even a bit better in dom3 than it was in dom2.

I find Pan to be a very interesting nation because they are flexible, but need to be played very differently to other nations because of their rather unique national troops + commanders.

Some vague thoughts for a bless strat, many parts are old Dom2 strats that should work as well or even better in Dom3:

Mother Oak is only Alteration 5, so if you research it asap you can usually keep it a while before it gets dispelled.

Destruction, Iron Warriors, Invulnerability and Wooden Warriors are also Alteration 1-5 spells.

Turmoil 3 is a bit more attractive because of Maenads.

I personally would invest most of my nature gems then in Carrion Reanimators.

A combination of Carrion Beasts with Maenads and centaurs/centaur warriors, all enchanced with some spells like Iron Warriors/Weapons of Sharpness/Regneration etc. etc. casted by Pans sounds imho scary in Midgame.

But the main problem i have with Pan is money. Centaurs cost a lot, Pans cost a lot, White Centaurs long for a strong bless, Maenads make Turmoil 3 somewhat attractive ... .

So i have always severe Research- and Moneyproblems as Pan compared to a nation like late era Argatha or Pythium .

[Gandalf Parker]

I greatly appreciate the comments that show Im not alone in my thinking here. Other threads had me beginning to wonder.

Boron: thanks for the comments on Pangaea in blitz games. Very appreciated. I particularly like this..

I find Pan to be a very interesting nation because they are flexible, but need to be played very differently to other nations because of their rather unique national troops + commanders.

Thats exactly how I feel about it. Too often when people put down Pangaea (not always, but often enough) I see that they are trying to play it like Ulm. Obviously they would suck at that. Im bugged when people rate a nation like Jotunheim, Caelum, Arcoscephale, Tien Chi without trying to use what is obviously a central theme to their design.

[KissBlade]

Harpies are also extraordinary patrollers if you just get an indie commander and set your capital to 200x tax while patrolling if you're doing a dual bless. You get a huge gold boost which makes up any poor scales you'll have to take for the strat. Most people dislike the population loss from such strats but the extra provinces you'll conquer from the extra troops generally makes up for it.

[Boron]

A Pan Strategy i have been fantasized about, but never used successfully so far in MP (iirc i have never played Pan in a Longterm MP at all because always when i wanted to try them i was already in too many games and when a new MP started i rather tried another nation then with another strat ...):

Pan: Carrion Doom

Keyspells: Haunted forest and creeping doom/swarm

Dominion is very important for this spell too.
If you buy lots of PD in your provinces, because of the manikins you get your provinces are much harder to raid.

IF you manage to spread your dominion into enemy territory too, and with the help of dryads stealth preaching this should be somehow possible, you could then use Pans and Dryads offensively who cast creeping doom and swarm.

Those manikin hordes are then a big problem for many enemy strats. The sleepvines can be even dangerous for SCs.

And because most of your stuff is stealthy you can combine this with your usual stealth strats too.

You could also try to massproduce Harpies.


Main Problem: DISPEL

Astral gems are unfortunately easier to get than nature gems. And there are other promising globals, mainly GoH and Gift of Nature's Bounty, and the ants+dragonflies need lots of nature gems too.

But hoarding is harder in Dom3, and you could get lots of extra nature gems via trading and via rushing to mother oak.

So my casting idea for haunted forest would be to cast the first haunted forest with a really high, but weird number of gems, like 583 extra nature gems.
Such an unorthodox number makes your opponents likely waste lots of pearls i think.
How would you try to dispel such a haunted forest?
Eventually it will get dispelled nontheless probably, but you can try to fool your opponents then by recasting haunted forest, sometimes with no extra gems, sometimes with like 2xx extra gems. This way they likely waste many more pearls for dispelling than usually.

If you only use nature gems for searching but save up all of them otherwise i think we can assume that we would get about 15 nature gems per turn from turn 20 on at least usually.
Till turn 20 you can at least save 100 nature gems too i think.
So at turn 60 you would then theoretically have at least 100+40x15=700 nature gems.

The 3 main questions are then:
1. How much did this slow down your progress till turn 60 if you would have used the nature gems for short-term gain investments like Ivy King Vine Ogre factories, Lamia Queens, Faery Queens, Firbolgs, Carrions etc. etc.?
2. Would you probably profit even more if you decided to save up your nature gems by casting GoH instead?
3. How many astral gems will your opponents have around turn 60? And how soon will they be able to dispel?

They might have used their astral income for short term investments, and thus have to save up for dispelling. But there might also have been someone who hoarded or has arcane nexus running.

So what do you think? Is it worth to try to include trying to "abuse" haunted forest in a pan strat?

[Boron]

Gandalf Parker said:
Boron: thanks for the comments on Pangaea in blitz games. Very appreciated. I particularly like this..

Thats exactly how I feel about it. Too often when people put down Pangaea (not always, but often enough) I see that they are trying to play it like Ulm. Obviously they would suck at that. Im bugged when people rate a nation like Jotunheim, Caelum, Arcoscephale, Tien Chi without trying to use what is obviously a central theme to their design.

Yeah this makes Dominions so great imho .

Dominions is very deep. I think the famous magic the gathering card game is most similiar to dominions.

In both games there are nearly endless options and most units(cards in MTG) are at least in a certain situation/strategy great. So there are almost no useless units at all (and those few units/spells that seem useless can be fixed via creative modding imho).

But because the game is so deep most players will focus on parts of the game only and develop certain specific stragies and specialise on some nations. This is okay of course .

But in this specialization the problem is that potentially there is the rub:
After you have discovered a playstyle you love and "mastered" one or a few nations you might think that you have mastered dominions. But you are too focused on some nations/strats and this can then hamper you more than you think when you try to play other nations that need very different approachs.
If you are used to blue counter/control/combo decks in MTG you might have difficulties making a good green/white rush deck.

Dominions goes even a step further than MTG imho, because MTG is a card game, so it has to be kept simple in some aspects to be playable at all. But Dominions is a PC game, so the PC does the dull work like calculating battles.
And thus Dominions is imho even deeper than MTG.
Many nations have unique national troops that require different approaches, and god design and national mages/spells make every nation unique.

But humans often think in schemes. But Dominions you have to try to play as open minded as possible. Nothing is completely useless, instead everything is useful in some situations and not so useful in other situations.
But these situations can change every turn.

This is imho the most important factor (in a no-diplomacy game) in a Dom MP game. The player who sums up the situation best during the whole game and then reacts accordingly usually wins. This is true for most strategy games, but in no pc-strategy game i know as hard to do as in Dominions, especially because the situation needs to be revaluated every turn and you have to try to be as open minded as possible.

This makes Dominions so unique and great, but everything has it's pros and cons, so occasionally this deepness can also be frustrating or leads to the situation that you say nation XYZ sucks, but it sucks probably only with the approach with which you tried to play this nation.

[KissBlade]

Heh Boron, this is a complete 180 from what I would expect you to say. You're possibly more powergamey than me!

[Gandalf Parker]

I agree with KissBlade. Boron you surprise me. I thought you were one of the "mp blitz is the whole game" people. I apologize for that.

Boron said:
But because the game is so deep most players will focus on parts of the game only and develop certain specific stragies and specialise on some nations. This is okay of course .

I totally have no problem with that. I recommend people find their niche. As long as they dont declare that to define the game and start talking in hard "facts" about what is broken and absolutely must be fixed. Im old, and diplomatic in the way I word things. The closest to an absolute I will let myself get in this game is "in my opinion", or maybe "for the way I play" something seems less than useful. If something works, I dont declare it broken just because it doesnt work the way I want. (there are some map commands and command-line switches I consider broken though)

But in this specialization the problem is that potentially there is the rub:
After you have discovered a playstyle you love and "mastered" one or a few nations you might think that you have mastered dominions. But you are too focused on some nations/strats and this can then hamper you more than you think when you try to play other nations that need very different approachs.

Yeah I try to warn about that. Find the nation that matches your style and you will kick tail. But dont be surprised when you go into multiplayer games to discover that other people settled just as comfortably into nations you thought were weak.

This is imho the most important factor (in a no-diplomacy game) in a Dom MP game. The player who sums up the situation best during the whole game and then reacts accordingly usually wins. This is true for most strategy games, but in no pc-strategy game i know as hard to do as in Dominions, especially because the situation needs to be revaluated every turn and you have to try to be as open minded as possible.

Ive had mixed results with that. Some people have so memorized the formulas and perfected their strategies that they simply HATE surprises. And others start out with no strategy at all but a large toolbox of tactics based on what shows up. Of course, abit of both is probably best, but I admit that Im more tactics than strategy.

This makes Dominions so unique and great, but everything has it's pros and cons, so occasionally this deepness can also be frustrating or leads to the situation that you say nation XYZ sucks, but it sucks probably only with the approach with which you tried to play this nation.

THANK YOU
I admit that some things "break" MP blitz games abit. And Im not against fixing those if its possible as long as it doesnt improve that game by poisoning others. Im also all for settings and map commands that can help balance MP games. I know that some prefer to KNOW that their game was won by strategy and not luck so something to turn down or remove events, maybe heroes, and then create chessboard-balanced maps for those games. (that way it wont affect my playing)