I suck with Pythium ... please help!

[Huzurdaddi]

it is a nice trick. the problem, of course, is the cost of the theurgs, and the lost research this involves.

The reason I always thought it worked nicely for Pythium is the nice cheap Acolyte. He gets the job done and at the cost of 5 or so principes, less if you count maintainance.

[Kel]

It's reasonably cheap, gold wise, but it will still hurt your early research.

Of course, if it lets you take a high dollar province that you couldn't otherwise, then you can put that towards anothre castle/lab to catch up in research. If it just saves a couple of principes from dying, though...well, let them do their duty and die for the empire

- Kel

[Boron]

Arralen said:
If you set them to "hold and attack", they'll fire at everything that comes in range. Which is not that great, sadly. So if placed forward enough, you might one lucky shot in before melee begins. If you use big enough stacks, those units in the rear actually fire at the nearby enemy while the front line is fighting.

Yeah i hate this too . Same with vanheim e.g. . I lost more valkieries because of throwing javelins from huskarls/vans then on indies .

Sometimes the javelins can be quite helpful e.g. when a barbarian horde stops just before you and all fire and the barbarians rout then . But normally you get more casualities through friendly fire by this then enemy kills .

Once you reach alteration 6 you can replace the body etheral by false horror spamming .
Really good against the Last indies / not too big player forces with normal morale like 10-15 .

If you scout earlygame you can give a player some trouble by casting a few call of the winds on his provinces and putting taxes to 200% + evading his main force .

I normally don't invest much in pd only 1 pd but later castles . So do a lot of other players too . So with a bit luck you can earlygame give an opponent some trouble . You need to time it cause it works only for 1-2 turns , after this the enemy will built higher pd
But as preparation for war when made properly on turn 10-20 this can prevent the enemy from building troops for 5-10 turns and perhaps even lead to upkeep problems .


Summoning can be a problem with pythium cause your mages can't summon much . So you have to carefully design your pretender according .

With 2.13 harbingers / archangels are a bit valorised .
I guess they will be a good competitor then for the role as good thug with banelords .

Pythium has imo a really good earlygame expansion rate cause you don't need to search provinces and can do this by accashic later .
So you can expand with your SC , first 1 later 2 theurg + principle squads .

[Vynd]

The body ethereal thing is nifty. But the principes are quite good in their own right. I wouldn't bother sending a bunch of mages along with them unless I wanted to crack a really tough indy province. And even then my preference would be to just send more principes.

[Huzurdaddi]

With 2.13 harbingers / archangels are a bit valorised .
I guess they will be a good competitor then for the role as good thug with banelords

Ok you got me interested. What have they done to these summons? I did not see it in the patch notes.

The body ethereal thing is nifty. But the principes are quite good in their own right.

I guess it depends upon the indep settings.

[Huzurdaddi]

So I downloaded the patch and I played enough to get a harbringer and I did not notice a change.

What was the change? Does the horn work now or something?

[Boron]

Huzurdaddi said:
So I downloaded the patch and I played enough to get a harbringer and I did not notice a change.

What was the change? Does the horn work now or something?

It is indirect

Because the Harbinger/Arch angel have 50% Fire resistence they still can use the burning pearl for +4 attack and get 100% Fire resistence ( or at least they should i haven't played much with 2.13 because i don't play much sp anymore and in mp the games are still 2.12 )

So with e.g. Banelord , Ice devil etc you have to chose now whether you want +4 att but only 50% fire resistence or +100% fire resistence .

I think you need 100% fire resistence at least against fire nations like abysia otherwise they can easy incinerate you to death then .

So not the Harbinger/Arch angel are better but with the Burning pearl change the Others like Banelords get a bit worse . Furthermore those 2 are built in sacred + priests on their own to bless them

I always thought bah 50 pearls for a lousy Arch angel when i have to pay only 10 deathgems for a Banelord but a Archangel has 14 base att and 11 base def , the Banelord 14 base att and 14 base def .
So all in all with e.g. a waterblessing + a burning pearl a Arch angel should be slightly better then a Banelord .

[Arryn]

Boron said:
I always thought bah 50 pearls for a lousy Arch angel when i have to pay only 10 deathgems for a Banelord but a Archangel has 14 base att and 11 base def , the Banelord 14 base att and 14 base def .

• Archangel is sacred, BL isn't.
• AA has 3F and 4H, BL has no magic at all.
• AA comes with 6 angels, BL comes by himself.
• AA flies, BL doesn't.
• AA has awe, BL has chill (awe is arguably more powerful, since it's harder to defend against).

The above items, especially the first two, account for the cost difference.

You need to quit looking at just a unit's combat stats and look at the totality of the unit's traits and gear when you attempt to compare units, and carefully examine how well that gestalt works in actual game play (as opposed to theoretical play).

[Boron]

Arryn said:
You need to quit looking at just a unit's combat stats and look at the totality of the unit's traits and gear when you attempt to compare units, and carefully examine how well that gestalt works in actual game play (as opposed to theoretical play).

You don't need to look at the gear because you normally always replace it anyways by magic items later as long it is not exactly what you want .

We agree here though anyways because i wrote in past tense that i always thought until a short time ago that an Archangel is too expensive . But the past tense should show that i don't think this now anymore especially with 2.13 .


Curious : What else can you do to try out finding good combos then first theoretically thinking what might be good and then testing it practically in mp ?

Arryn said:
AA has awe, BL has chill (awe is arguably more powerful, since it's harder to defend against).

Does cold resistence protect against chill ?

Does awe work against ranged attacks too ? I guess only against melee .

[Arryn]

Boron said:
You don't need to look at the gear because you normally always replace it anyways by magic items later as long it is not exactly what you want .

Wrong, you must. The reason for this is because the game's devs factored it into the unit's cost, regardless of your feelings for the worth of the gear.

When you compare two units on the basis of their cost, you must compare them as-is, not after you've equipped them. Otherwise, you must compare the TOTAL costs for each unit after you've piled on whatever you will stuff them with. Finally, any such comparison is invalid if the units aren't used for the same purpose. Most players would not (for example) equip an Archangel with the same gear that they'd give a Banelord, nor would they employ the AA and BL for the same purposes (BLs are typically used as mini-SCs, AAs as ritual casters and battlefield support).

Boron said:
But the past tense should show that i don't think this now anymore especially with 2.13 .

Perhaps so, but you didn't bother to elaborate as to why you think/thought as you do/did.

Boron said:
Curious : What else can you do to try out finding good combos then first theoretically thinking what might be good and then testing it practically in mp?

I try them first in real SP games. If it sucks in SP it'll very likely suck even worse in MP.

Boron said:
Does cold resistence protect against chill ?

Yes.

Boron said:
Does awe work against ranged attacks too ? I guess only against melee .

No. Yes.