A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6

[Baalz]

Sometimes its fun to play a nation in an unexpected way. Rather than going with the obvious synergies that you’ve seen the nation played with over and over again you can often come up with a competitive build for a nation that really surprises your opponents expecting the same old same old. Pangaea, yawn, all I have to do is be able to wade through hoards of barkskin’ed maenads and pop vine critters, right?

EA Pangaea has some really nice units, and some generally under utilized synergies. The problem is those great units are fairly expensive and their (glaringly non sacred) good mages are extremely expensive…while turmoil is “always” taken. Instead of planning our nation around maenads and dryads (weak sauce) lets design our nation around the top shelf stuff. Now, of course everything I lay out here is available to a certain extent regardless of the build you go with, it’s just a matter of focus.

Pans do generate maenads at a (much) slower rate in a neutral order/turmoil scale. The ability goes away if there are order scales, so the sweet spot here is neutrality. The lower maenad output will be somewhat compensated by the fact that we’re going to be having more Pans but we’re certainly going to be having a significant amount less maenads than the classic Pangaea build. You know what? That’s ok, you’ll still have plenty of warm bodies for castle defense/storming, decoys, etc. – you just won’t be trying to run out the battle timer before your opponent can chew through your endless hordes. The thing is, there’s actually a fairly small amount of times that 1000 maenads are much better than 200 – either your opponent can chew through a whole bunch of them or not.

The other prong of our strategy is going to be very sensitive to our upkeep. Pans are great, but you’re going to rapidly find the upkeep eating you alive. Your high end troops are also great, but expensive troops means expensive upkeep. So, how do we focus on our good stuff without quickly becoming unwieldy? Well, we focus on efficiency, we’ll be using smaller numbers of good units instead of a bunch of crap.

White centaurs are not as good as the real top class sacreds, but they are still pretty good and quite capable of dominating most indies very economically. The great thing about them too, is they will benefit substantially from almost any blessing you want to take so you’ve got a lot of flexibility in taking a pretender. Even just mid level blessings like F4, W4, N4, E4, B4 will provide a noticeable boost, but of course the big versions of all of those are very welcome as well (well, B8 that is…no point in B9). The details are gonna vary depending on exactly what you decide to go with, but it’s generally not too hard to field an expansion party every turn from your cap pretty quickly. Note, for the first few turns we are gonna be using dryads, but we’ll switch to focusing on Pans fairly soon. A pretty aggressive expansion and fairly good income scales (for Pangaea at least) while leveraging cost effective sacred expansion parties will see your income spike pretty fast.

Before you really start cranking out the Pans you’re going to want to castle up a bit. Having a bunch of castles gets you several things. First, it bumps up your income – even more differentiating your income from the ‘standard’ Pangaea build. Second, you’re shortly going to be sitting on a whole bunch of maeanads, making storming your castles very, very difficult. Third, you’ve got three different non-mage national commanders that you’re gonna want to steadily crank out. Lastly, having a bunch of castles allows you to pump troops out very quickly if you need them, so you can avoid having them sitting around eating up all your income when you don’t. You’re gonna find that it’s not that hard to get to the point that all of your income can be spent cranking out Pans – but don’t do that (at this point). Instead steadily invest in putting up more castles while modestly building up your Pans. Don’t worry about putting labs up in all those castles, at this point in the game just pump out black harpies. With a swarm of those flying dudes there’s a good chance you’ll the best intel available to any player in the early game. Your temples are only 200 gold, so it can be well worthwhile to get a bunch of Centaur Hierophants to stick vine bows on early (constr-0). With a high precision & strength, several of these guys working together will do a pretty good job of locking down anything super heavy that gives you trouble early on (like enemy pretenders). This works way better than casting tangling vines as you’ve got 24 ammunition and no option to go off script so a few guys working together have a very good chance of keeping one or two enemy big guys unable to do anything for a good long while. Centaurs can also be a great way to add a touch of unexpected lightning damage with thunder bows if you can line up somebody like Obscuro or trade for them. When you’re ready to go a-raiding, black harpies have 10 leadership, and 10 (non sacred) centaurs are a perfectly reasonable PD raiding squad, so you can do fun stuff with very broad sneak attacks having a dozen such squads (spit out of all those castles) having snuck all over enemy territory before they know what’s going on. You can play quite aggressively against plenty of nations with no magic support at all now that you’re focusing on your good units…but then again why would you want to go with no magic support?

Pans are expensive, but the upkeep problem is not really gonna start hitting you immediately. What is going to hit you immediately is how fast your research piles up early. Each one of those pans spits out 10-11 research in a magic-1 scale, which is 2-3 times as much as many nation’s research mages. Sure, you’ve got an abysmal gold cost per research point but in raw research points piling up while people are mostly constrained by how many forts they’ve got you’re very fast out the gate. You have a little bit of breathing room before the upkeep starts pulling you down, and you can make a lot with it.

With this ticking clock of upkeep piling up you’ve got one urgent goal, probably no surprise but I think B-lining for transformation is critical for this strategy. The great news is that alteration research is where you want to focus anyway so there’s not really much of an opportunity cost. Depending on what you need on the battlefield it may make sense to swing up and get summon earthpower, and there are a couple other relatively low level stuff I’ll discuss in a bit that you may need to pick up for a specific situation, but by default just punch alteration all the way – you’ll climb it pretty fast with your speed out the gate.

On your way up to transformation you’ll pick up…
Level 3:

Protection – don’t overlook this very early edge. Just two dryads (or Pans) can cover a dozen of “hold and attack” centaurs which brings them up to the level of real top level sacreds.

Curse of stones – unless you get a very lucky early random you’ll probably have to pick up summon earthpower before this is an option – but it’s a serious war-winning spell against the right nation. Most people don’t realize how good this spell can be, but if you have 2-3 Pans cast it at the beginning of a big fight (like as you’re attacking an enemy cap) it’s gonna come close to knocking out half the enemy melee effectiveness if they’ve got human-esq 10 MR. No other battlefield wide spells are available anywhere near as early. As the game progresses don’t forget about this little gem – add some penetration boosters and the range of usefulness opens up quite a bit.

Level 4:
Destruction – You can use this lightly without summon earthpower by passing out E gems, but this is the other big reason you might want to detour briefly to conjuration. Those high defense, 2 attacking good strength centaur warriors are pretty damn scary when your armor all falls off…but what is even better is combo’ing that with those high precision longbow wielding centaur archers. It’s hard to make them cost effective without that combo, but with it almost any enemy troops will die way faster than they can chew through your modest amounts of maenads and...

Swarm – There are many great uses for this spell, not the least of which is to give your opponent one more layer of stuff to chew on while destruction and arrows decimate them. You’ve got a great N income and having mages who can pump this out for several turns makes it very hard for many enemy strats.

Level 5:

Mother oak. I know, taking N on your pretender for Pangaea is counterintuitive, but it gets you a lot of stuff when you think about it (more on that in a bit), not the least of which is being all but guaranteed to get the mother oak up with no need to do construction research or count on a lucky early random. Mother oak is important because as good as your nature income is going to be you’re going to have an equally high appetite. A N blessing also works surprisingly good on the white centaurs – their defense is high enough that they don’t get hit with that high a frequency, their hps are high enough that it takes several hits to take them down, and their protection (particularly once they berserk) means a bit of regen can account for mid range hits.

Wooden Warriors – Well, now all your centaurs should be substantial bad asses, including the non-sacred ones. That regen bless starts looking really good now – it takes a substantial sustained damage output to bring those 20+ defense, 20+ protection, 20+ hp guys down when they’re regenning several points per turn. Giants can’t hit them because of their D, smaller guys can’t damage them fast enough.

Iron warriors – This works great on something like a small group of vanguard white centaurs to bring them up to ‘absurdly difficult to kill’. Now drop destruction around them without worrying too much about a little friendly fire and let those bows do a good impression of a machine gun. We’ve also got some other very nasty uses for this spell I’ll get into in a minute.

Level 6:
Iron Bane- This works great with centaurs along with the protection buffs you’re dropping, but more importantly it opens up some strong tactics for important fights. A clever opponent is going to try to deploy in such a way as to make destruction difficult to land. Iron bane though, there’s no way for him to dodge. The thing about iron bane is it requires a melee hit to destroy the armor, making it a much less effective combo with your archers, unless….you could find some light flyers to run up and tap the bad guy’s shield once. Mmmm, how does chewing through that swarm spam sound now as the arrows rain down? This also turns harpies into a substantial threat all by themselves. You can mass them quickly and easily, and with two claw attacks you can often have a decent shot at doing heinous enough damage to the enemy in your first strike that they break without even a retaliatory hit. This strat scales up very nicely as you end up stacking on strength of giants/rush of strength and panic/blood rain. Then again, harpies are cheap enough to use as kamikazes anyway, so if they do get popped you won’t lose any sleep.

Petrify – Oh, lament the loss of the blood stone! You’re gonna have trouble using this early on, but it’s worthwhile to go through a bit of effort to use later on as nothing says love like unresistable paralyzation in combination with the nasty stuff I detail down below. What kind of effort? Sabaath works out well if you’re already bringing several Pans to a fight. Have the slaves dropping the above buffs while the masters spam petrify and reinvigoration. Alternatively summon hellpower is not that hard to pull off, and vine critters make great horror popping bodyguards.

Level 7:

Marble warriors: Yeah, obviously your centaurs are now the stuff of nightmares, but don’t overlook how this folds in with the harpy/iron bane strat I just suggested.

Transformation. In my MA Oceana guide I went into why transformation is such a great deal, and I don’t want to repeat it but I will say that if you use it for nothing at all other than research mages (you know, those 10 rp ones?) its in the longer term kinda like pumping out 10rp skull mentors for 3N without the need for a hammer or any limit to how many you can do per turn (you can cast it with every one of your Pans the turn you get it). Obviously you want to save up your N gems leading into getting it, but having the mother oak up along with your naturally strong N income it shouldn’t really be a problem. At this point your upkeep is going to rapidly evaporate and you can now put labs in all those extra castles until you can crank out a stupid number of Pans each turn. Your research is going to explode – and as I’ve gone at lengths to illustrate the path to get here leaves you very strong through the whole thing.

As scary as all that so far sounds, remember we’re still pretty early in the game and you’ve got all kinds of nastiness still to bring to the party. Clever opponents are hardly gonna be content to line up their guys as convenient centaur/destruction targets, so lets look at some fun stuff in your arsenal when they try and get cute. We’ve worked hard to drop our upkeep on the Pans, you’ll also want to prune back the number of centaurs and other upkeep producing troops you have. You’ll always have a spot for them, but you’ll continue to aim at smaller numbers of really tough guys and supplement with summons and maenads. (yes, your transformed Pans stop producing them, but you’ve got a steady stream of new Pans so you’ll still find nekid ladies always underfoot)

Regeneration is nice, easy low hanging fruit at enchant-3. This is certainly an option to keep in mind to stack on top of the centaur-centric main line tactic, but even better is to consider some higher hitpoint stuff that’ll gain even more of a benefit. With ench-3 you also get dragon master, so having a pan or two summoning cave drakes is a great little side strat – when those dudes are regenerating it practically forces your opponent to go with a counter specifically to them which is different than everything else you’re doing. If your opponent doesn’t happen to have a counter there they can be practically impossible to get through while your other stuff dishes out nasty damage. What’s even better though is…

With upkeep free blood hunters you can eventually be quite a blood powerhouse…though be mindful of the opportunity cost of sacrificing gold income and all those upkeep free Pans. With a very, very modest blood income though you can crank out a hell of a lot of dark vines. As anybody who’s run into these guys as indies knows they can be pretty scary with over a hundred hitpoints and 3 armor piercing attacks. You drop regeneration on them and that nice large amount of hitpoints is growing back at 12 per turn….and remember how I said I had further nasty uses for iron warriors? Ah, now there’s something you really don’t mind dropping destruction around while the bad guys do a great impression of running into a brick wall! This also works wonderfully with poison cloud as they’re poison immune. These guys move slow enough that a single pan can buff 2 of them with both these buffs, so its really not that hard to have 6-10 of them where they need to be and your opponent is not gonna be pleased. Then again, at 3 blood slaves apiece you’re also pretty easily able to mass more impressive numbers once you are looking at marble warriors and mass regen. They’ve got a 15 MR and are mindless (no soul slay, paralyze, etc.) so it’s actually fairly difficult to field a good counter to them.

Now, what about fighting really tough stuff? Hinnom or Neifelheim or Fomoria think they can ignore your centaurs and chop up your dark vines, eh? Well, there’s one more non mage commanders that’s a great idea to churn out from your labless castles. Oh man, having a stable of minotaur lords is so nasty it makes me giggle.

That modest blood income you’ve got should mean you’ve got an essentially unlimited number of flesheater axes. Flesheater axes give you a +3 berserk. Use that mother oak fueled N income to crank out a whole bunch of lycanthrop amulets. These give your minotaur lords 3 regen and +4 strength, and more importantly auto-berserks them at the start of the fight…with an 8 berserk rating. That brings your strength up to…29, with an attack of 19. The axe hits for an impressive 14 damage with a 3 attack….so that’s 43 damage with a 22 attack. You can stick a second flesheater easily enough, though if you’re attacking high defense SCs it’s probably better to go with something like a hunter’s knife to keep your dual wield attack values up – and a ring of the warrior can be a very nice budget accessory to let you avoid shields. Not much is tough enough to even care about the chest wounds! Now, it’s probably not going to come as a surprise at this point that I’m going to suggest how this looks when you toss iron warriors on those badasses. With that +8 berserk value those minotaurs are now at a 30 protection, with 29 hitpoins and 3 regen. Slap a dozen maenads on guard commander with each of them, along with a couple swarms to keep the enemy broken up and they are very hard to take down fast and hit just about as hard as anything in the game. At 40 gold, 5 slaves and 5N (plus whatever second weapon you want) your opponent is going to get *very* tired of seeing these guys. Remember how I said petrify’s unresistable paralyzation was gonna hurt? Imagine that spammed from behind a bunch of these charging buzzsaws…

Hehe, now the extra evil, nasty barb in here to – nobody is gonna wanna get in melee with those minotaurs so mages are going to be brought in to deal with them. If the enemy mages are successful, there’s a good chance they’ll pick up a lycanthrops amulet at the end of the battle and forever be worthless for combat – eventually switching to a skinshifter and not being a mage at all. You can avoid a similar fate on your Pans by shoving cheap blood items like SDRs or warrior rings into their slots…or better yet lifelong protections. This is really, really nasty as the bad guys get busy fighting imps and thus don’t notice the avalanche charging towards them. If you’ve got the blood slaves lifelong protections are great investments (they work fine at 2 per commander) – it’s a never ending supplement to the swarms you’re casting. They’re a bit expensive, but you don’t have too much demand on your blood economy so they’re a reasonable choice for the overflow. As long as you’re going for it though you may want to stick black hearts in the Pan’s second misc slot – lifelong protection + charm is naaaasty in an assassination. Or leech if that sounds better. Point is the imps will often pin the bad guy and bodyguards for long enough to make him very unhappy.

Note: those minotaur lords are going to trample anybody smaller than size 3…which can certainly be effective enough, but you’re better off using regular minotaurs with marble warriors + haste if that’s the direction you want to go.

On the longer term horizion, as I’ve laid out you’ve got a good reason to take N on your pretender, and you struggle a bit for magic diversity I think it also makes a lot of sense to take a little D on your pretender so you can easily get into llamia queens. You can also use this to get some vinecritter generators early on if they seem like they’d help. Once you get to llamia queens though you get some nice further nastiness to drop. Crank out a bunch of bane venom charms and use them with flocks of black harpies. You can leave them in your lab, then when you need them rapidly converge a bunch of the harpies on labs then sneak them right into the path of an advancing army. Having 6 or more of these deployed thusly will do a good job of diseasing a significant portion of the enemy army as well as the commanders – and you don’t have to wait till you’re being invaded…do this as one neighbor invades the other and they’ll both be easy pickings as the winner’s army withers. Another fun thing you can do is use the fact that the harpies fly to hop over a couple enemy provinces to make it look like a bunch of bane venom laden scouts are sneaking in from another nation’s border. *whistles innocently* No need to just wait on one of your neighbors to decide to invade another. Note: for longer deployments you can use a lycanthrop amulet for cheap regen on the harpies so they don’t die, but you can also just rotate the bane venom charm to another harpy and let the first one recouperate.

Llamia queens also get you vamp lords (assuming your pretender didn’t), or with more modest research vamps. 200 gold temples + blood sac and vamps can be very tempting, particularly as you’ve already got access to darkness + marble warriors + iron bane makes vamps…unpleasant. Late game, pushing for the big blood research is tempting as Rush of Strength is nasty with Iron Bane, Infernal Crusades are pretty scary along with blood rain and panic spam, leech + black hearts + lifelong protections will cause some swearing…and blood vengeance + invulnerability + person regeneration is just what those few Pans that transformed into something scary want. If you’re so inclined you can leverage the llamia queens/vamp lords into fairly strong death access. Fairy court adds some welcome diversity to A. As with several nations you’ve got a glaring lack of astral magic and no easy way to rectify it, but with the rest of your hand being nice and strong this shouldn’t be crippling.