Warrior Pretender

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by BigDaddy

Really? That overpriced? Did you try him?

You mean her? The VQ?

Ok, so there's the obvious comparison to the Lich, who has better stats, starting dominion, and arguably magic (since blood magic on a pretender is mostly useless unless you want the minor bless, and you don't take VQ as a bless chassis). Starting with Dom 2 saves you 56 points on Dom 9 relative to starting Dom 1. And i've only taken an awake Lich as LA Rlyeh, who can afford to burn points on its pretender because its taking bad scales anyway.

But the vanilla pricetag of 180 is truly ridiculous. Even CBM's 110 is too much. I'd say its a 75 pt. chassis, tops. The problem is that its one real advantage over, say, the lich, is its 30pt/path, so you want a pile of magic on her to make her worth choosing. But after paying her chassis cost and necessary dominion 9+, you've already spent a pile of points. After magic you basically have nothing left for scales, and probably sacked most of them to have her awake, and you got no bless out of it. And then she's a defensive pretender because you don't want to leave dominion to take advantage of that immortality. Of course, the need for high dom coupled with the need to take bad scales to afford doing anything worthwhile with her leaves you with territory that is mostly worthless.

The only nations who would contemplate scales as bad as would be needed to take her awake either can control their dom spread (Mictlan), or just want a huge bless regardless of the scale effect (Lanka), or don't care about the gold economy that much (LA Rlyeh, LA Ermor). Of those, only Ermor would even consider her (Rlyeh can't, Lanka and Mictlan are looking for blesses, not crazy pretenders).

So, in vanilla, Dom 9 + chassis is already 432pts, putting you down over 2 scales to be awake, and that's before you've even touched magic for her! That's a lot of points for an inherently defensive pretender. And even after dumping magic into her, you get a pretender who can maybe best 40% of indies by turn 4 or so, more likely 12 because she isn't waking up until then.

(And yes, Dom 9 is required in order to be able to use her anywhere, because otherwise why bother with an immortal pretender?)

No, I would never take her in MP. A defensive pretender isn't worth that much to me. As an amusing handicap she might see use in SP...

Edits:
-175, not 180 pts. Close enough.
-VQ isn't even a rainbow in vanilla? Suck. Ok, there is absolutely no reason to *ever* take a VQ in vanilla.