Guide: MA Pangaea strategies

[quantum_mechani]

Dedas said:
Growth is not needed of course, as the tunes work very well even without it (perhaps death is too much though).

Yes you are losing some research, but as dryads are also pretty good commanders (40) they can lead small armies. With tunes they can cut down on troop amount directing money to fortresses leading to faster research.

I can agree on that dryads are not the best unit to use initially, though later on you will have loads of them as you hire them as researchers as well. Some of them could be used behind enemy lines accompanied with revelers and cause some damage. You might have noticed that they now have +25 stealth making them ideal stealth preachers whom are also capable of defending themselves.

Harpies are good for scouting and patrolling, that is for sure. Thanks for the tip.

I'm still unclear if you are recommending it for expanding vs indies, or actually employing it against other nations. Expanding seems doable, though rather suboptimal, due to research troubles. Applying it directly against human players, the tactic strikes me as risky in the extreme, there are any number of counters from sacreds to mindless units to archers to damage spells.

I'd also advise against wasting time with stealth preaching in all but the most niche of situations (mostly after all research has been completed and you have many weak mage priests with little else to so).

Scout harpies I consider a whole other matter from early patrolling, even though harpy scouts have ten leadership, I wouldn't bother giving them harpy troops.

Anyway, I don't mean to be argumentative, just fostering some lively debate.

EDIT: I wholly agree on the lord of the wild being a quite poor choice (and the carrion dragon being by and large overshadowed by other choices), but it's not really an issue specific to Pan or national pretenders.

[RamsHead]

quantum_mechani said:
I'm still unclear if you are recommending it for expanding vs undies...

Expanding undies!

[quantum_mechani]

RamsHead said:

Expanding undies!

Ah, right to the heart of the issue, an inescapable point (at least, barring stealth edits).

[Dedas]

Well, putting all your money into research in the early game is one viable strategy.
Another is to put it in military units (if you have good ones as Pan does) to expand your economy by grabbing as many provinces as possible and still be able to defend them from early rushers.
Yet another, and a more common one, is to try doing everything at once. This will of course make your error marginal smaller, as one unlucky event (like losing your pretender) can cost you the game.

Which way you choose depends of course on the situation at hand, like your own nation, the psyche of your opponents, the map size and so forth.

The point I'm making is that there isn't just one "best way" to begin the game. There are a lot of difficult questions to answer and decide upon. Yes research is important, but so is expanding, not to forget defense or offense against other players. Should you balance all these or will one lead to the other in a more stable and powerful way if you maximize it? Indeed difficult questions, not easily answered.

[Gregstrom]

kasavada: There are a couple of evocations that Pans can cast, although most will need Earth Boots or Summon Earthpower to do it. Firstly, there's Blade Wind, which isn't too shabby a spell. Then there's Earthquake - a bit of a stretch for most Pans, but if you're using lots of armoured centaurs then you can get away with casting a couple in a fight, causing much more suffering to the enemy than yourself.

[edit] Added some notes on early turns.

[kasnavada]

Gregstrom said:
kasavada: There are a couple of evocations that Pans can cast, although most will need Earth Boots or Summon Earthpower to do it. Firstly, there's Blade Wind, which isn't too shabby a spell. Then there's Earthquake - a bit of a stretch for most Pans, but if you're using lots of armoured centaurs then you can get away with casting a couple in a fight, causing much more suffering to the enemy than yourself.

Ah thanks. It's really a big stretch though, since about 1/4 of pans start with 3 earth .

[Torin]

pans are not so stealthy when the leaderless maenads attack the province he is in. So the lord of the wild.
Why you even want to patrol? to catch spies? or you are blood hunting with more than four bood mages?

[quantum_mechani]

Dedas said:

The point I'm making is that there isn't just one "best way" to begin the game. There are a lot of difficult questions to answer and decide upon. Yes research is important, but so is expanding, not to forget defense or offense against other players. Should you balance all these or will one lead to the other in a more stable and powerful way if you maximize it? Indeed difficult questions, not easily answered.

I'd say this only goes up to a point. Putting aside somewhat degenerate/special situations (very odd game settings, some duels), most front runner players follow rather consistent paths. There are many things you will almost never see such players use, and others that will almost always get abused at the slightest opportunity. So I suppose my point is that while a true and ultimate "best way" is unlikely to be agreed upon, it is in general possible to classify a particular tactic as useful or suboptimal with a significant degree of accuracy.

With this particular tactic what I'm getting at is I believe you can expand just as fast or faster without it while maintaining faster research.