Looking for a good PBEM setup. Post your favorite

[Alneyan]

A couple more points I had forgotten:

- This setup is vulnerable to flyers, as most (if not all) combattants relying on spells to have a fighting chance. You should stay clear from provinces with flyers (Raptors and Tritons mostly) before you can get a Staff of Storms.

- The Virtue can also be used as a spellslinger, relying on Orb Lightning or Shockwave. In this case, she should have some reinvigoration, either in the form of an item, or the Summon Earthpower spell. If a commander is too fatigued, anything can be a threat, including Ghost Wolves: fatigue lowers defence and protection, and that's never good news.

- That setup also results in a few minor boosts for blessed units, namely a weak Air Shield and a +2 bonus to Magic Resistance. It is nothing to write home about, but +2 to MR is nice enough, especially as it stacks with all other bonuses to MR.

[Boron]

Take Mictlan, do a F9W9 moloch, turmoil 3 sloth 3 heat 3 drain 3 growth 3 luck 3, dominion 7, watchtower.

Just build hordes of jaguar warriors and eagle warriors and overrun your enemies with sacred hordes of doom .

As long as the map is not bigger than around 80 provinces and unless you don't fight caelum/man/vanheim or pythium your opponents should have nothing to beat you in the first 20-30 turns.
I mentioned those 4 nations because they are all 4 airnations and thus can research seeking arrow quickly which will hurt your priests and thus eventually stop your advance or at least delay it significantly.
The longer the game continues the more vulnerable you get.

But playing with a dualbless is great fun and very exciting in the earlygame and midgame. Can you overwhelm your opponents quickly enough? Or do they find something to delay you long enough to develop countermeasures?

[PDF]

Alneyan
Very good and informative post, thanks

However for the setup you describe I don't think the Virtue is the best choice ; a GK is cheaper and immortal, a Titan is marginally cheaper and more sturdy (they dont'fly naturally though).
And your scales are real crap, you'll have a hard time getting conventional early game armies, then you'll have decreasing gold due to heavy Death scale...

Personally I use high path costs Pretenders mostly for focused magic/high level bless (F9A9 Virtue, or even S9F9 Oracle) , and prefer to have 3, less often 4-paths SCs out of Nataraja, Moloch, Titans or other high-HP chassis.

Immortals are somewhat special as they allow to get reusable killers, and thus profit from having varied magic (think of it as "payloads" ).

Then you have the good'ol Rainbow, that you can mix with Immortal chassis to have very effective pretenders out of a GK or Lich.

[Alneyan]

Ghost Kings are not immortals PDF, so you cannot get Immortality *and* the cheap cost of a GK. If you do want an Immortal, it will have to be the Phoenix or the Vampire Queen (or the Bog Mummy for a nation specific Pretender, or the immobile that is Immortal and whose name I have forgotten... the Glyph, I think). But I agree there are better choices than the Virtue, particulary the Phoenix, but what can I say? I simply love the Virtue.

Note, however, that the scales are pretty much standard fare, at least in those games here, and you can certainly do very well with them. If you use Zen Scales mod, it may be another matter however (I never tried those scales under the Scales mod). Some national units can be recruited, especially archers, or mercenaries can do the fighting, but the main fighting force will be the Pretender herself, as soon as Alteration 2 comes online, with the other units handling the weak independents. Sloth 3 gives... let me see, -30% resources or so, and resources are what will slow you down while recruiting those heavy infantry units. Still, the difference is not that important, and national units are not a necessity. Jurri won a game with Jotunheim while recruting a minimal number of national troops, and those were mostly fodder in the very first few turns (before turn 5 I think).

[Arralen]

Spending 240 points = 6(!) scales on making a Virtue a semi-rainbow pretender is ridiculous.

This can only work with low indies (<7) and >12 prov/player, with easy expansion and no early threat, and easy research.

With stronger indies, you'll run into lots of provinces which the Virtue cannot take alone or with just a handful of crappy units. And with a low number of provinces per player, every prov you cannot get (and have to go around) makes you loose momentum in comparison to the other players.

[Graeme Dice]

Arralen said:
With stronger indies, you'll run into lots of provinces which the Virtue cannot take alone or with just a handful of crappy units.

Stronger indies mostly increases the numbers of troops you will face, not their quality. Once a virtue has mistform and mirror image (with sufficient air magic) most indies won't hurt her. Once you've also researched shockwave, there are few indies that she won't conquer very quickly. I will quite happily take on knight and longbowman provinces at indies 9 with an A9 virtue. She'd be scripted as: mirror image, mistform, attack, shockwave, shockwave, cast spells.

[Zen]

I'd probably go Air Shield, Mirror Image, Mistform, Attack, Shockwave, Cast Spells.

But Graeme's advice is good.

[Graeme Dice]

Air shield is good except when your enemy doesn't have archers and you've reasearched alteration 5. Then it gets you routed and killed when you cast a single false horror.

[Zen]

Graeme Dice said:
I will quite happily take on knight and longbowman provinces at indies 9 with an A9 virtue. She'd be scripted as: mirror image, mistform, attack, shockwave, shockwave, cast spells.

Assumption archers: Positive.

[Alneyan]

What they said. Even a Virtue going in melee with her buffs can work very well, though Air spells alone are unlikely to be sufficient (the only point is to get experience faster, I believe).

On the contrary, the better the independents, and the harder the research, the better the Virtue does: if independents are on level 3, then any small army will take them down, making fighting Pretenders useless in expansion. And the Virtue absolutely loves the Knights.