Bogarus advice

[sector24]

Definitely need an awake SC for this nation. Your national troops are very weak so expansion will be slow and painful without one.

[TheMenacer]

I don't know if you necessarily need an SC for expansion. I generally have a pretty easy time of it in SP with the swordsman infantry, who compare pretty favorably to light infantry, a handful of the really good cavalry units and a whole mess of the crappy archers being shuttled around by my prophetized starting commander set to smite constantly.

Given the reasonable effectiveness of that, I can't help but imagine that once you switch to using battlemages instead of just your one guy smiting individual targets, you'll really tear some [edit: haha, whoops. Gotta watch that language.] up.

Obviously that's not gonna protect you from other SC pretenders or bless rushes, but Bogarus benefits like crazy from a rainbow pretender because it's got tons of diversity, but no water or nature and it can't get to boosters in many of the paths it does have.

Also this has nothing to do with troops, but you can take cold 3 in pretender design for extra points, since all of your troops are cold resistant you don't feel any negative effects but the loss of income.

[Zenzei]

I agree with sector24, an awake SC god is a must for Bogarus to get the expansion going. Their starting army is at lower end of spectrum and needs quite a lot of boosting before it becomes a viable force.

[sector24]

You can get away with a N/W pretender in SP for sure, but I think Bogarus is a prime target for a rush in MP. Dr. P wrote up a very detailed "first 5 turns" guide back when the nation came out using a Prince of Death with some earth magic. This was back when the infantry all had mapmove 1 and weaker shields. Things may have changed slightly but I still consider the national troops below average.

[Sombre]

I think you can go for uberscales with Bogarus to fairly good effect. Once you start expanding (after the first few turns) their cavalry are up there with most other nations' national troops. It's really just right at the start that they suck, or in comparison with bless/trampler expanding nations.

Definitely more of a mid/late race though. Bit like Marverni or Patala.