EA Vanhiem advice

[PyroStock]

Revolution said:
Right now I'm thinking Imprisoned Arch mage with F9E4 Dom stength 8, order 3, sloth 2, misfortune 1, magic 1.
Comments/suggestions?

F9E4 Dom1 Arch Mage = 400 design points
F9E4 Dom1 Red Dragon = 426 design points
W9E4 Dom1 Blue Dragon = 426 design points
W9E4 Dom3 Father of Winters = 421 design points
W9E4A1 Dom1 Frost Father = 425 design points

Edit: Base dominion used for comparison purposes, not as a suggestion.

[sector24]

F9W9 seems to be the standard bless for EA Vanheim. Water is not just for the extra attack, but the incredibly high defense and AP.

[thejeff]

Except Vanheres don't have an incredibly high defense, even with W9, since their base defense is fairly low, and when they go berserk it drops even more. Seems to me there's little synergy there.

I did well with a F9E9 Cyclops. The protection stacks nicely with their armor and the bless armor bonus.
The biggest weakness is arrows. They are fairly slow and unshielded, until you can start using Storm or Arrow Fend. W9 would help with that by letting them close faster.

[Shovah32]

Most people are probably thinking of the sacred cavalry nations like Helheim and MA Vanheim get, with their very high defence and AP.

[Kuritza]

Dunno about the pretender, but magic-wise try Van sabbath. Van jarls as slaves, vanadrotts as masters. Cast storm and air power, then van jarls proceed with thunder strikes while drotts take turns casting rejuvenation between thunder strikes. It resets fatique for all slaves - result can be really scary. Lots of high precision mages spamming thunder strike and not getting any fatique until turn 5.

One big problem is that sometimes storm is the last spell being cast... thus air power fails, whole combo is screwed. Dont know why it happened for me, really, I thought globals are always first in the stack. So a much safer idea would be a staff of storms or just storm on turn 1, while your sabbath is busy gutting blood slaves.

When I had that untimely storm, my Hangadrotts (I tried Van sabbath with Helheim) decided that spamming raise skeletons is a very good idea and killed Jarl slaves with fatique At least the huge tide of skeletons won that battle for me.

[Olive]

Kuritza said:
One big problem is that sometimes storm is the last spell being cast... thus air power fails, whole combo is screwed. Dont know why it happened for me, really, I thought globals are always first in the stack.

Commanders are taking action in the same order than they are displayed on the strategic map (left of the screen) or in the army setup screen.

[Kuritza]

Oh blast it. I suspected something like that. I dont believe there's a way to alter that order, is there?