Lanka Pretender Design

[Veraticus]

Hi everyone,

Hopefully soon I'll be playing in my very first multiplayer game as Lanka. Unfortunately the guides for Lanka seem pretty old and none of them address CBM, and while I've played a few singleplayer games I'm not really confident in my MP pretender design. Also I didn't do super great singleplayer which makes me thing I'm probably designing my pretender wrong. Or just playing wrong, one of the two...

Here's what I've got so far:

1. I want an Imprisoned Pretender, but CBM makes Cyclops pretty expensive. I was thinking Crone or Druid instead so that I could get magic on the cheap, but neither one seems like an excellent pick to me.
1. A strong bless (like W9N9) is not optional. Some people recommend taking an additional E4 but I don't see how they can afford it. Is E9N9 just better overall, possibly?
2. Heat scales are obvious, but the rest of my scales are sort of a mess. I know I can go for a fair amount of Drain and be happy, but in the singleplayer games I've tried, I always found myself short of gold in the beginning of the game, probably because I took so much Turmoil. I also really like Luck 3 but I'm not sure I can afford it.

I think it's obvious I'm not totally sure what I'm doing. So if anyone had design tips I'd really appreciate it!

[Executor]

Order-misfortune, or turmoil-luck are the usual choices. If you take misfortune consider having 1- provinces the entire game due to indies, and luck just gives you a lot of gems basically.

I'd recommend order.

Heat3 obviously, death 1-2 is always good if you don't have old mages.
Don't take drain, don't ever take drain, but if you do go straight for skull mentors than.

An imprisoned or sleeping pretender, you really don't need him for expansion or anything.
As for bless scales, take something that befefits Raksarajas, E/N/W

Example,
O3
S1
H3
G/D 0
L/M 0
M1

Sleeping druid, W6/E4/N6 Dom 7

Doe I'd take S3, D1, Misfortune 2 personally for a better bless, and imprisoned pretender.

[Bonfire]

Disclaimer: I've only ever played around with them in single player so take what I say with a grain of salt.
First the bless earth, nature, water and astral are what you want to look at. A minor fire bless would be a nice addition but you don't really have a good chassis for it unless you're going for a rainbow bless.

Earth(4-9): Keeps your sacreds from fatiguing out. Good for heavily armored sacreds, thugs, mages.
Nature(4-8): Keeps sacreds alive, affliction free. Good for all sacreds but especially for your thugs. N9 is a huge liability with sacred mages don't go that high unless you really know what you're doing.
Water(9): Helps to kill things faster and get hit less often. Great for your less durable lightly armored sacreds.
Astral(4-9): Keeps your demons from being banished. Twist fate can be surprisingly useful.

Which bless you take is going to effect which sacreds you recruit and summon. The biggest factor in my mind is whether you take an astral bless. Without it most of your demon troops are fairly easy to banish and you'll need to rely much more on your non-demon Kala-Mukha Warriors and high MR thugs.

With that in mind there are a couple pretender chassis that stand out to me.

Great Mother: E9N6 or similar
Lady of Fortune: W9S6 or similar
Mother of Rivers: W9E(4-6) or W9N(4-6) or W9E4N4
Oracle: S9W9 or S9E9
Crone: F4W4E4S6N6 or similar rainbow

As for scales:
Turmoil/Luck can work with a blood nation but you have to switch to a blood based economy very quickly to compensate for the lost income. Unless you're very confident going into blood go Order 3 with maybe misfortune 0-2. Order/Luck is nice but it's hard to afford with a decent bless.
Sloth-1 is easily tolerable but lower than that and you may have trouble recruiting a full set of you armored sacreds from your forts. Sloth-3 is workable as long as you plan to rely on your less armored sacreds at first.
Heat-3
Death can be a good place to pick up points.
Magic/Drain: Drain is very tempting to keep your demons from being banished but you're losing something like a third of your research potential on your non capital mages compared to magic 1. If you take drain just make sure you get something good enough to make up for that.

[thejeff]

Be careful with Death scales and a blood economy. Your hunting provinces will drop below optimal pretty quickly.

[Natpy]

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?p=638491

[Veraticus]

Thanks for the advice, everyone!

I think I'll go for W9/E6/N6. Cheaper than W9/N9 and I don't have to worry about berserk mages, but I get most of the benefits of Nature anyway and some cheap reinvigoration.

For Dominion, I'm still concerned about income and suchlike. What I arrived on was:

Dominion 6
Sloth 1
Heat 3
Growth 3
Misfortune 2
Drain 2

The Drain kinda sucks, but it also helps protect my units from banishment, which is good. With Order and Growth I should be able to have a pretty good gold economy and then a pretty good Blood economy. I'll give it a shot in singleplayer and see how it works.

[Isokron]

I have played (and won) two mp games with Lanka using an imprisoned master druid f4w4e9s4d1n4b1 O3S3H3Mi2Ma1 Dom7. Which I think gives a very good mix of blessing, dominion and magic diversity.

You usually get a strong start (although the first few turns might be slow with sloth 3) with your very strong blessed units and might want to rush someone somewhat early. Then reserch blood aggressively (with some con and alt thrown in). You will be somewhat weak in midgame until you reach blood8 at which point your power will skyrocket if you have gotten a good bloodeconomy going. Use your pretender to sitesearch, forge hammer/boosters and get magic diversity (icedevils, archdemons, illearth etc).

[Peter Ebbesen]

While I like all the suggestions already given, let me suggest just one more for the collection under CBM 1.6

An Imprisoned Lady of Fortune with W9E4S4N4. With that blessing you can afford

Dom 8
Order 3
Sloth 3
Heat 3
Growth 2
Luck 0
Drain 2

with 9 points wasted.

Or take two points of misfortune, which while objectively a better build is dreadfully unthematic with a Lady of Fortune pretender but will allow you to take less Sloth or more Growth (or more astral if you want to gain lategame wishing access) as you desire based on expected game size and speed. Strictly speaking you don't need the high dominion either, but you can afford it with this blessing and it is always nice to have - especially in EA, which is full of blood sacrificing nations - the one blood ability Lanka does not have.

You gain a bit of fatigue reduction to counter the high base encumbrance of your recruitable sacreds and S4 makes your common demons a bit more magic resistant while N4 is enough to give you the affliction protection of regeneration (which is the most important part of regeneration on your common demons) combined with a nice 2hp/round. With E4S4 you are also guaranteed native access to crystal items, RoS, and RoW if the game lasts long enough to take you into the end-game.

This is in many ways a modest blessing but it is one the Lady of Fortune is well suited for.