Pretender Design

[OmikronWarrior]

I'd recommend reading up on some of the strategy guides in the similarly named stickied thread. My Midgard guide specifically discusses different pretender builds later in the write up, and so do many others.

Some other food for thought:

There are basically four accepted Pretender builds. Not every Pretender falls neatly in one of these categories, but they are the exceptions, and these are the rules. Adding further confusion, sometimes a physical form is also called one of these categories while an actual build belongs to another. I'll discuss that later. Anywho...

1) Rainbow: A rainbow pretender means multiple magic paths. Usually, these are those 10 or so HP guys and gals with 1 dominion. Why? Because it only costs 10 design points to add another path. These builds are usually awake/asleep.

Uses: If awake, a rainbow can be used to boost early game research. Once some teritory is taken, they are typically sent out to site search giving the nation a magic gem boost. Beyond that, they can help a nation easily break into new magic paths and offer a lot of versatility for supporting armies. For example, a rainbow with fire and death can build flaming skulls, a useful booster that gives +1 to fire magic and helps out fire nations with out death magic. Popular options for the rainbow include the Enchantress and the Sage.

Cons: Low base dominion more or less obsoletes lower starting costs. Also, low HP makes pretender vulnerable throughout game.

2. Super Combatant (SC): This tends to be a go to build for many nations. The idea behind it is simple, have a unit capable of challenging armies on its own from very early on. This type of Pretender is almost always awake and only rarely asleep. Beyond this, there is a lot of diversity in how to build a one man army from the get go. Popular (and widely different) options include the Prince of Death, the Cyclops, Dragons, and the Wyrm.

Uses: A player typically picks up an awake SC to grab more indepent provinces quicker. They also tend to scale in power with research and equipment making them useful deterents to discourage aggressive players from invading territory.

Cons: Some builds, like the no magic path Wyrm, become obsolete soon. Regardless, SC's typically lack the long term advantages of rainbows or a positive scale build and they don't leave players a lot of design points to work with.

3. Bless Builds: Every nation comes with sacred units which can be blessed by priests to gain bonuses based on the starting magic paths of the pretender. For certain nations, these units when combined with the right bless become dominant on the battlefield and able to conquer provinces when outnumbered. For this build, the actual Pretender form is secondary to what paths he has. A typical bless build needs at least one path at level-9, more commonly two level-9 magic paths. The Fire-9, Water-9 combo is especially potent for the insane offensive it provides. These paths cost a ton of pretender ponts, and finding the cheapest way to get the desired paths becomes the best way to go about building a bless pretender. Typically, a bless pretender is imprisoned and only rarely sleeping. That being said, most sacred units are capitol only and can only be build at a rate equal to the current max domain. The Cyclops is a common choice for bless pretenders as the Earth-3 base makes it cheaper to get to Earth-9.

Uses: Blesses are all about early game expansion. Buy the sacreds, add a priest to do the blessings, and sent them off. Then, at some much later point a Pretender with crazy high magic paths shows up as cake frosting.

Cons: These are typically very expensive to build and forces to the player to rely on his sacreds for his early game and often take negative scales.

4) Immobiles: These are sort of a niche Pretender option, as these guys cannot move (though some can teleport). The typical advantages of immobiles is high starting Astral magic (and a high level Astral mage is really useful come endgame), cheaper initial design point costs, and high starting domain. These builds are ideal for getting the highest possible scales. As such, the typical Immobile is either asleep or Imprisoned. The most useful Immobile is probably the Oracle.

Uses: As said above, Immobiles are mostly cheap. Some are useful for getting a specific bless, but if not that, than they are usually picked for scales and Astral magic.

Cons: They cannot move. This means they have trouble contributing early on. They cannot take indie provinces. They cannot search for magic sites. They cannot engage invading armies until your capitol is put to siege, at which point its probably to late for your nation anyways. Admittedly, the spell teleport changes this somewhat (but not for the Sphinx), but getting an immobile is betting on the other strengths of the player's nation prevailing.

5) Misc.: There are other builds. For example, a Ghost King tends to function as a hybrid SC and rainbow (but does neither well). Notice how there is not a specific "high scales" pretender. Some players do at times pursue what is essentially a high scale strategy, but ultimately you have to pick what to do beyond scales and choose one of the above options: more early expansion, more midgame magic, or even more scales.

Hope this was helpful.