Nation Guide for Marverni

[iainuki]

I'd like to respond to a couple of points.

First, about slingers: I didn't mean that the slingers were useless in all circumstances, but rather they only have some niche uses and that independents outcompete them for the most part. A Marverni slinger is just as gold-expensive as a Marverni bare chest, and for the most part I usually find I'm gold-limited, not resource-limited, in recruitment. Moreover, independent slingers and archers of various sorts are comparable to the Marverni slingers and because they're resource-cheap, you can often hire 20 or so a turn from a forest or mountain province; I'd rather spend fortress turns on other units. Are there any real advantages slingers have that should make you choose them over independent archers, presuming you have access to both? Against archers, I've found slingers not to be so good: even shortbows outrange you and often the tribal or independent archers have more armor than you do so the shield doesn't give too much of an advantage. The AI/independents puts its archers way in the back so slingers will usually run into the heavy-infantry line before being able to shoot the archers, and against humans, a slingers-in-front deployment is easy to rout with a cavalry charge. Against glamored troops, slingers break glamor well but they have extreme trouble doing the killing afterwards. A typical example is Vanheim, where their huskarls have protection 9 and a shield, so they take little damage from slings but the Marverni bare chest's broad sword still works quite well, and unlike javelins and melee weapons, Marverni has no guaranteed easy way to buff them. (Yes, flame arrows, if you have fire on your pretender and found independent fire mages or can spare your pretender to buff your slingers.) Finally, Marverni gets lots of slingers in its PD, so even if you never hire a single one you still often have decent numbers available.

Eponi knights get two attacks in CBM, but not in vanilla. In CBM I can see wanting to close first, though that's always a bit risky in MP because your opponent is probably thinking the same thing. I have more experience with vanilla so that's what I thought of first--I will probably add an addendum to future versions of the guide, which I will probably put on the wiki.

The trouble with Carnute bare chests is I'm not sure when I'd use them. They really aren't much better at armor penetration than Marverni bare chests (7 axe + 11 Str = 18 versus 6 broad sword + 10 Str = 16) without berserk, but if you're using Carnute bare chests instead of Carnute nobles chances are you're up against high-damage or armor-negating attacks which will kill them in one hit and thus they won't go berserk. In the later parts of the game, I find that I have an overabundance of resources so I'd rather just hire more Carnute nobles even if I'm facing high-damage or armor-negating attacks because they aren't much more gold-expensive than the Carnute bare chests.

Fantomen, I don't understand your comment: "Marverni should take luck *and* order IMO. The bloodhenge druids are so good for kick starting bloodstone production that the lack of synergy is neglible."

I mean, I don't know what bloodhenge druids have to do with luck and order, and I've never seen bloodhenge druids as recruitables. (I have wished many times for them!) Luck and order can work if you're going for max scales; it works better in CBM, I think, because of the increased effect of luck on random events.