Good Pretender design for Marverni?

[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 =\.