Pangaea advice

[Cainehill]

I don't have much experience / luck with blood, but it does seem that a blood fountain would be a bad idea, if you mean to have it blood hunting in the capitol. You really don't want to muck up your capitol, with any nation. If you take it simply to cast high-blood spells, that's different, but out of my expertise.

Unrest : The free maenads for default Pangaea are pretty decent in my opinion - just make sure to recruit enough Pans to generate lots. One very nice thing is that they generate even while you're away from your fortresses, meaning that you can get reinforcements as you go along.

High Production : depends on your plans. I've played most Carrion Woods, where I try to get the bloody cowardly satyrs killed off so I don't have to pay upkeep. This gives me a very low impression of the satyrs, because of their atrocious morale. Hoplites and the minotaurs are better, but ... Better in my opinion to go high unrest (3), 0 (or max 1) Sloth, just so you can build -some- of the heavier units.

That or take a high admin fortress (30+) to compensate somewhat.

Again - most of my experience though is Carrion Woods, or trying more for summoned armies (vine men / ogres, kitharonic lions, etc) because of my dim view of Pangaea's home brewed troops.

Thus, I also don't have much experience with blessings for them.

Hope this helped a bit.

[mr.white]

You should rely on the centaur warriors...they are damn good. Especially buffed with strength of giants, because their hoof attack is strength-based, so it counts double. Legions of steel is also nice for survival. They have just low enough protection for it to be annoying.

I had a guy use a force like that on me, and they absolutely MAULED a horde of C'tis elite warriors.
Those centaur warriors had some experience, but the point is that with recuperation and high speed you actually have a good chance of getting and keeping experienced centaurs.

As for turmoil, No. You lose a lot of income that way, and it only means that pans in your territory will get more maenads. You want to be on the offensive, and maenads aren't that good anyway.

Beyond that I don't know enough about pangaea to answer.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by izaqyos:
1. Should I take high turmoil?
High turmoil attracts maenads but lowers taxes increase unrest and forces me to patrol heavily.

Turmoil has absolutely no effect whatsoever on unrest.

[WraithLord]

Better in my opinion to go high unrest (3), 0 (or max 1) Sloth, just so you can build -some- of the heavier units.

That or take a high admin fortress (30+) to compensate somewhat.

I tried that (fortress + turmoil 3) and got a very lame economy with the added burden of supporting harpy patrollers. had anyone experienced better results under the same conditions?
Also, this might be a viable strat for the carrion woods theme since it will kill economy anyway. But the deafault theme should not neglect the economy aspect.

Turmoil has absolutely no effect whatsoever on unrest.

edit: I checked the manual and it confirms it.
Thanks for the correction.
I wonder why I has such a high unrest in my provinces then?- with no blood hunting and tax rate of 100 at the begining of the game??

[ May 31, 2004, 15:43: Message edited by: izaqyos ]

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by izaqyos:
I wonder why I has such a high unrest in my provinces then?- with no blood hunting and tax rate of 100 at the begining of the game??

Near as I can tell, every time a battle is fought in a province, the unrest goes up. (Maybe not every time, but probably most of the time.) A lot of random events also drive unrest up, and there are magic sites that also drive it up.

I try to take a look at the nation overview each turn, with units off, just to check the unrest & taxes in each one. When unrest starts getting to 20, I start thinking about dropping the taxes. If unrest is over 30, I drop taxes to 0 until unrest is 0 again.

And yes, in a couple of SP games with standard Pangaea I've had some success with the high Turmoil, 450 GP fortifications. Using Pans and the Maenads in conjunction with regular troops worked well enough that I could have 2 armies taking provinces from very early in the game.

One of course was my Carrion Dragon; the other would have a dryad, a Pan, and a centaur or two commanding satyrs and centaurs. Generally I'd attack a province, search it the next turn, and have enough Maenads again to attack the next province.

Then, the 30 admin fort would be built, not so much on high resource provinces, but on high gold provinces (especially with high resource neighbors). If a province generated 50 GP a turn, the fortress pays itself off in 30 turns. Faster than that, imo, because it keeps me from losing the base 50 for a couple of turns to a random event invasion.

I'm not saying this is an ideal way to play stock Pangaea, but my test SP games (going to turn 30 or 40) against difficult opponents tended to have me in the leading position on most graphs.

[WraithLord]

try to take a look at the nation overview each turn, with units off, just to check the unrest & taxes in each one. When unrest starts getting to 20, I start thinking about dropping the taxes. If unrest is over 30, I drop taxes to 0 until unrest is 0 again.

That's some great advice. thanks.

How about a bless strategy?
I tried the carrion dragon with 9 picks of nature and death.
I tested my blessed centaurs in battle and they were awesome.

But maybe the medusa can give a better bless with nature and earth or maybe I can go for a rainbow mage for both site search and lesser bless effects of all paths.
Did anyone try going for bless pretender?

[Teraswaerto]

Lord of Fertility with Nature 10 gives White Centaurs Berserker +7 (or 6 if you go with only Nature 9), which is pretty nice, and it doesn't cost a fortune either.

[Huzurdaddi]

How about a bless strategy?

Never tried it, but W9 with the white Centaurs looks pretty good. A definite mid-top range bless troop. I'm just saying water since their defence is what stands out ( this will get reduced by beserk, *sigh*).

Anyway they are home province so I don't know if I would base my strategy around them.

[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Huzurdaddi:

quote:

---

How about a bless strategy?

Never tried it, but W9 with the white Centaurs looks pretty good. A definite mid-top range bless troop. I'm just saying water since their defence is what stands out ( this will get reduced by beserk, *sigh*).

Anyway they are home province so I don't know if I would base my strategy around them.

---

That was one of my issues with the Black Centaurs, since the only real bless strategies I've had with Pan are with CW. Capitol only, on a large map it's tough to get them where they're needed (unless / until you get to the "Walking hand in hand through the forests" spell).

Tough and effective, but not something I could see building a strategy around, not like Battle Vestals, Flagellants, Jotuns, etc.

[alexti]

In the early game Pangaea has a very good unit - centaur warrior and the expansion phase will mostly rely on centaur warriors and pretender. The major Pangaea weakness is poor research and lack of offensive magic. To compensate for that I would suggest magic+2 which will make a passable researcher from dryad (5p for 110 gold and you're getting level-3 priests with it). Pans are very expensive and they will take most of your income, so it's better to rely on summons later. I usually mix lamias for survivability, Vine Ogres for a meat shield and various (weak and strong) undead. This is in line with poor research, because you only need conjuration and construction to setup good summon production. Ivy Kings and Lamia Queens are optimal for nature chain-summons. Lamia Queens will also give you an access to death magic and astral magic. Later on you can summon few demiliches to do your further undead summoning.

I wouldn't rely on maenads, because in MP most will be playing order, and you would like to have order in your empire too, because of your costly mages. Hoplites are decent troops, but they're slow and their time of usability is quite short. Plus they cost upkeep. Same applies to armored minotaurs. So I would sacrifice productivity and take sloth-3.

So the scales come to Order+3/Prod-3/Luck-2/Magic+2. To further increase income and somewhat compensate for poor productivity I'd take castle.

This leaves plenty of points to build a pretender. There're 2 goals here: cover missing magic paths and create good SC to help early expansion. The good choice here is infamous vampire queen. Something like fire-2,air-3,water-2,earth-1,death-3,blood-3. This will give you good indy conquerer with alteration-3, "almost" rainbow mage for site searching, plus an item forger.

I wasn't taking infamous VQ myself, trying to find some other good pretender, but whatever I've tried, VQ would be better. Even if you don't want to take VQ, pretender should probably be build along those lines.