Pythium: newbish Vestals question

[Wendigo]

Fahdiz, I do not think bless strategies work too well with Pythium, as these usually work best on nations with powerful sacred troops.

For something cheap & efective you might consider 4+Earth on the Pretender: it gives your mages & communicants reinvigoration when blessed, gives you a good shot at finding Firbolg forts (extra forts always good for someone that wants to pump out communicants in numbers), and Lastly it gives you a dwarven hammer forger to take advantage of your good gem income.

[fahdiz]

Excellent. Thank you so much, Wendigo and Wauthan. I really do appreciate the help!

[licker]

Originally posted by geo981010:
Licker-
Water 9 is great on most holy mages, but that blessing and Pythium mages doesn't add up to the sum of the parts. Water 9 gives 50% quickness like you mentioned (2 spells/attacks 1 round, only one the next), but the quickness spell gives quickness 100% (2 attacks every round). Since you have to be blessed to get the Holy bonus, any non-prophet mage should be quickened anyway on the same round as the Divine Blessing is cast on the battlefield. Very little gain for their mages...

For holy mages that don't get Water magic like Marignon and Vanheim (especially Vanheim - no feet and no random magic on the Vanir, so that's the only real way to get them quickened), the bonus is really powerful

True, and as the blessing doesn't stack with the spell (otherwise I don't see why it wouldn't be good, 3 casts/round)... I'm not much of a Pythium player, never taken past turn 10 so I'm not overly familiar with their units. However, for the Vestals, if you want to employ a blessing strat for them, water9 would still seem to be ideal. Earth and Nature don't really augment them (and nature is bad bad bad for sacred mages usually). Air isn't that useful, though maybe Pythium can benefit from the high level lightning protection with orb lightning? Fire and Blood... well fire is always decent, blood is ok (but not the death curse). I dunno, as someone said, Pythium may not be a great nation to bother with blessings, but if you insist on doing it anyway... I'd stick with water9 and not worry about the mages

[fahdiz]

Originally posted by licker:
I dunno, as someone said, Pythium may not be a great nation to bother with blessings, but if you insist on doing it anyway... I'd stick with water9 and not worry about the mages

I don't insist on anything with this game, except that it is the best fantasy-themed wargame I've ever played, bar none. I'm here to learn from more experienced players and to become more experienced myself, not to insist. I figured that since I was having trouble I'd see if what I was trying was really worth it after all.

I think if I do try for a bless strategy (just to see what happens) I might take 9-Water (for the reasons everyone has given), but I probably will abandon the bless strategy for vanilla Pythium and go with Wendigo's 4-Earth idea to test out more of my options.

Thanks everybody for your help!

[ February 13, 2004, 16:31: Message edited by: fahdiz ]

[licker]

Earth4 is fine and all, but reinvig1 is pretty much useless, oh boy, 1 whole fatigue point back per turn You don't need earth4 for fribolgs do you? Rainbow blessing is interesting if you are making a rainbow mage, but unless your sacred troops are going to be used in quantity its still probably a waste from just taking lvl3 in the same paths (for searching lvl4 only gets you ~5% more sites, and some of them arn't that great anyway) and boosting your scales or dominion.

Playing with high blessings and lots of sacred troops is fun though, competative... I dunno, SP its fine, MP, I'm not sure there's been enough data to really show.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by licker:
[QB] Earth4 is fine and all, but reinvig1 is pretty much useless, oh boy, 1 whole fatigue point back per turn

Check again. Earth 4 is reinvigoration 2.

[fahdiz]

Originally posted by licker:
Playing with high blessings and lots of sacred troops is fun though, competative... I dunno, SP its fine, MP, I'm not sure there's been enough data to really show.

Yes, I was mostly just asking regarding SP, since I don't dare try MP yet with my limited knowledge of the game. I guess I should have specified that.

I agree that high blessings are really fun, and it's a ball trying out new things - in fact, I have yet to find anything about this game that I *don't* find fun.

Thanks again.

[Pocus]

even though water 9 is perhaps the best blessing for units with a good defence stat as Vestals, you can emphasize on some of (standard) Pythium strength, Air :

air 9 + air ward > a nice protection for a vestal based army with 2-3 archtheurgs casting wrathful skies.

fire 9 + mass flying, with a core of legionaires as bodyguards: flying vestals attacking with flamming weapon the rear (generally flyer manage to hit the rear while grounded hit the flanks of a large army). In essence they have first strike with a powerful flaming spear.

[fahdiz]

Originally posted by Pocus:
fire 9 + mass flying, with a core of legionaires as bodyguards: flying vestals attacking with flamming weapon the rear (generally flyer manage to hit the rear while grounded hit the flanks of a large army). In essence they have first strike with a powerful flaming spear.

Very interesting...and a very cool suggestion. I don't think I can research high enough in the demo to get mass flying (or can I?) but it's something I'll have to try out as soon as my copy of the game arrives.

Thank you, Pocus.