EA Pangea carrion dragon bless and scales.

[Finalgenesis]

carrion dragons may be deceptive in how scary it looks. However it's low prot, low def, bad slots, high hp. As is it cannot perform reliably as a SC. It has high fear so awe would do well, except its base dom is 1. It doesn't even fly! Basically, it can't be a rainbow, and neither is it an effective early SC.

What's worst is its innate path doesn't help with SC, D is more ritual and battle casting rather then buffing except for soul vortex (lvl 6 spell, too late to matter and waste for awake SC). N is good for resist and regen, except you are lifeless and can't regen. If you want regen, you need the national lvl 4 ench spell requiring a lvl 2 priest to cast regen/quickness on you...

I wouldn't worry about a bless, you don't have exceptional sacreds and your main mage isn't sacred. The white centaur while good is pretty expensive in vanilla, turmoil doesn't help and you can go with maenads instead. Unless you want to try funky Dryad mini thug novelty or some such I wouldn't go out of my way for bless.

Turmoil Luck could work if you plan to make good use of maenads. Not only do you get more maenads, you are also a minor blood nation, and turmoil's lost gold income is negated for those province you blood hunt and set tax to 0. Reliance on maenad (which works good against AI) gives you assured sloth 3 on top, that's a lot of points. Luck can give you gold too, though probably less amount and consistent then order, it'd also give you gems and remove indie invasion events as a concern (even with -1 misfortunate, they happen often...). You'd need to be effective in gold spending early on though.

Luck also gives you better chance at transformation for Pans to remove their insane upkeep as Baalz suggested, for fun only it'd make improved crossbreeding better too, basilisks are NASTY (similar to catoplebas!).

Under vanilla, there are those that swear by an awake Gorgon (E9 N4, A1-2 or D2 for example), the Gorgon looks deceptively weak but is in fact the premier chaff cleaner and makes an amazing awake SC for nitro expansion (it can fly too and can handle any early enemy expansion party with ease, cutting off chokepoints and leaving the secured center for later expansion is very viable), just try it, it'd also make your white centaurs premier elite troops. Saint shroud if you find indies becomes a great armor too for a selection of caster/thugs/SCs. Oh, remember to make her a rawhide shield on turn 1.

[Jarkko]

In vanilla Dom3 there is only one *sane* pretender choice for EA Pangaea: Dom10 Awake Gorgon with E9N4 and possibly two points in Air. It makes her one helluva tough SC right of the box, although I would craft her two shields before sending her out. She only gets tougher when you research the basic nature, earth and air buffing spells, and she will be very useful for raids and leading armies even late into the game (later on she will first cast those army wide buffing spells before going in toe to toe with the enemy).

What is more, the E9N4 makes dryads pretty nasty thugs. Slap on a Vine shield, a piece of armour and some weapon with AoE, script Bless HolyAvenger Attack, and watch them rip through enemy ranks. High protection, Awe and regeneration is a crucial combo for the longevity of a thug


Then again, if you want for *thematical* reasons use a Carrion Dragon, then take D4N4 (so that you can later on summon Carrion Lords plus any and all death-summons you might want; remember that it is easy to empower to blood later on for the Death-Blood summons and items, also don't forget about Lamia Queens) and at least Dom9. With effective Fear 19 nobody (who are not immune to psychology, of course) will succeed the Awe check, so he is invulnerable in melee.

However, you will need somebody to actually deal damage, even indy slingers will do but for the first turns you have to rely on the javelin chukkers; you don't need much damage done, because the opponents will fail all morale checks because of the high fear. Just be sure to place the "damage dealers" (you don't often think of slingers as damage dealers, do you? ) well behind the Carrion Dragon, so that the enemy never makes contact with them before they rout because of all those morale tests caused by the minor damage.

[Gandalf Parker]

Pangaea is one of my favorite nations.

Carrion Dragon can be interesting on a large map. Pangaea's built-in advantages of early spotting (flying stealth scouts) and the ability to put out an entirely stealthy army (leaders, mages, priests, infantry, archers, cavalry) can be paired up with a surprise tactic of CD. Use the Pan form of the dragon to lead a stealth army directly to someones capital while they think they are still operating safely in expansion mode. When you get to where you are going, change to dragon and attack the province. This saves you from having to use one action slot to change form at the beginning of the combat. This tactic can get you 1 or 2 early capitals where you can then put time into consolidating the space between them (its not as useful later in the game)

The other thematic pretender, Lord of the Wild can also be used but is a very different situation. He can stealth, or lead, but cannot lead a stealth army due to his habit of gathering maenads. If he does not lead the maenads will drop to the province and create an attack message which is handy for getting totally accurate scouting info but bad for trying to sneak up on someone.

I agree with D4N4. Pangaea is one of those nations that lack the ability to cast their own national spells. Very strange. But Im not big on E9N4. The sacreds of Pangaea are mostly unarmored so I would be bigger on the idea of mage/archer protection if you were going to go with blesses. The Gorgon/E9N4 is playable if you plan to play Pangaea as a marching army and go head-to-head. But if you are playing that, why play Pangaea?