Good Pretender design for Marverni?

[KissBlade]

SelfishGene said:
I think the issue is the difficulty in amassing Ambibates sufficient numbers to survive until such point as you can begin using Druids in battle. Marverni is a "middle game" nation, with a weak early and somewhat weak late game.

So you either make a SC Pretender that can tank and fight for you until you have enough research to use druids, or you pump out huge masses of Ambibates and Eponi cavalry. But if you're rushed in the first 20 turns by anything other than a human nation (Ctis, Pangaea, Kaliasa, ect), you won't have enough troops - or good enough troops - to survive.

On paper Marverni looks ok, but i think they're rather weak in practice. They've only got a couple of decent national units, and have to rely totally on mages/magical gems for anything past the early game. This is hard to do if your fighting one one or two fronts against human opponents....

In practice, they're no weaker than any other non archer nation that doesn't rely on blesses. I don't see how you're even having trouble against C'tis "rushes" unless they're going a dual 9 serpent dancer on you, their troops are mostly just hoarding waves of trashy units, a practice that Marveni can replicate. Especially because slings and javs are very much underestimated in EA IMO. Also, aside from heavy blessers, I can't think of any situation where your nationals will get completely outpowered by another's. If you're going to complain about someone else's pretender though, well if someone spends 300 + points in their pretender compared to you, they deserve some sort of advantage, non?

On paper, Maverni looks like an average balanced nation because in practice, they are a well balanced average nation. Your main problem is you're probably comparing them to NOT well balanced nations. (Niefel/Hel/Lanka coming to mind for one ...)

[SelfishGene]

Er., chariots? Trampling units eat Marverni for breakfast, and aren't EAs Ctis Chariots fairly decent? (Good morale?)

Chariots are one reason why i love EA Tien Chi . (Excellent artillery casters are another).

[KissBlade]

SelfishGene said:
Er., chariots? Trampling units eat Marverni for breakfast, and aren't EAs Ctis Chariots fairly decent? (Good morale?)

Chariots are one reason why i love EA Tien Chi . (Excellent artillery casters are another).

Have you ever tried to mass chariots...? not to mention by the time they get enough numbers of them, you should easily be able to get some battlemagic. Personally if you're building high gold high resource units, they better do something besides kill a few units and then rout themselves. Also it's not that difficult to defend against chariots between mercenaries and eponi knights.

[SelfishGene]

I know in multi my Marerni hordes (bolstered by some 80 indie archers) were very easily routed by a Pangaea with hordes of Warriors/Revelers, Maenads, and those trampling bull guys whom name escapes me at the moment. Minotaurs?

Chariots are much harder to mass than the Minotaurs but have better armor and defence, so i imagine they would work similarly. Perhaps not.

I've never built Chariots in multi as i've never had the opportunity. Previously, in Dom2, Chariots always sucked. In the Early Era, they are not, perhaps, quite so bad.

[KissBlade]

SelfishGene said:
I know in multi my Marerni hordes (bolstered by some 80 indie archers) were very easily routed by a Pangaea with hordes of Warriors/Revelers, Maenads, and those trampling bull guys whom name escapes me at the moment. Minotaurs?

Chariots are much harder to mass than the Minotaurs but have better armor and defence, so i imagine they would work similarly. Perhaps not.

I've never built Chariots in multi as i've never had the opportunity. Previously, in Dom2, Chariots always sucked. In the Early Era, they are not, perhaps, quite so bad.

1) They had berserkers, you didn't.
2) By the time, the game has reached the "hordes" stage, you should've had blade wind.
3) If you're worried about tramplers, use eponi's. Script your archers to "fire archers" Your cav should be scripted to "target large monsters" to engage the minotaurs.

[SelfishGene]

Turn 12ish i should have had blade wind? I suppose that's fair criticism...

And, btw, i had mostly Eponi, with archer and ambibate support.

[KissBlade]

SelfishGene said:
Turn 12ish i should have had blade wind? I suppose that's fair criticism...

And, btw, i had mostly Eponi, with archer and ambibate support.

At turn 12ish, your wars should be conducted mostly by raiding, especially because you're a stronger magic nation than he is. Colliding with his army at that time is stupid because even if you win the battle, you're taking way higher losses than you need to without magic support. In order words, you won't get any decisive victories. The only time this is different is if he's gunning straight for your capital in which case, you have home field advantage because 1) you know where he's going to go.
2) You can still raid off his backline making him either have to split his army or take losses in provinces.
3) you can buff your own army up with pd.
4) your reinforcements are faster than his.
If you had pumped roughly equal amounts of gold into your army vs his, you should not have been routed if you scripted properly. Turn 12ish, you should be getting blade wind soon anyway. The more likely scenario is his minotaurs trampled your infantry while your eponi got tangled up into his mass of revelers/maenads.

There's no reason not to gun up the evocation tree with Maverni unless you're getting buffs for your combat pretender. In which case, where the heck is he if you're trying to fight a decisive battle? With that said, even around turn 12ish, Blade wind shouldnt' be that far out of reach. It's only 360 research, and you should be building nonstop druids starting around turn 6-8.

Lastly, there's always the off chance that you routed earlier than normal just because you got unlucky. Since he was using mostly berserkers, the battle could've went either you wiping out a large chunk of his army or you routing way earier than you should. But them's the breaks, as they say =\.