Pythium's Magery

[Huzurdaddi]

When you want to deal damage you have two spells: Thunderstrike ( which is great ), and Falling Frost ( decent ) and that is about it.

Enslave mind is decent aginst SC's but not usually worth it when you are facing larger armies.

OTOH you can buff your army with quite a few spells: Anti-magic, Astral Healing ( which your theurges will cast by themselves, and quite often in some battles. Leading to some comical communicants ), Arrow Fend, Mass Flight, Doom, Will of the Fates, Fog Warriors.

[Shovah32]

And of course dont forget the suicidal F2 mage with crystal matrix casting phoenix power with multiple communicants attacking closest If its a F2 arch theurg you could cast flight second turn too(and feel free to add in a screen for protection while buffing)

[Manuk]

Enslave mind is useful almost always.

[Cor]

TwoBits said:
Off the Theurg topic, but does anyone make any use out of the Battle Vestals? Seems that if they could be massed, with a decent light bless, they could do some damage (they're plenty cheap). But is it worth it going that route, with pretender design and all?

I have played with a triple bless and found them stellar. 9W9D6air they do some serious damage.

[Shovah32]

Almost any sacred unit would do serious damage with that bless. To put it simply you shouldnt plan a bless strategy on battle vestals because they are fragile and not particularly adept at dealing damage. If they recieve a bless from your pretender thats fine but you really shouldnt make your strategy around them as your already have a passable military and your nation benefits from good scales very strongly(a bit of a bless for theurgs/angels such as nature, earth or astral is another nice bonus but i dont reccomend planning a strategy around it).

[Baalz]

Hmmm, hopefully not too much OT, but has anybody put Bandar Log's recruitable mages to good use? Lots of potential communicants, but I can't find anything terribly effective to do with a S/N mage except in a few cases. Unscripted they do silly things like Touch of Madness and Healing Light. Ethereal elephants are pretty good, and Enslave Mind can be useful against some kinds of enemies, but I have a hard time justifying them as combat mages based on their effectiveness. Anybody more clever than I have something sneaky to do with them short of the high research straight astral spells?

[Shovah32]

Bandar Logs strongest mages(forget the name) are quite nice. They can forge alot of nice magic items(regen, luck, MR ect) for your national summons and a group of them(i get as many as i can asap) soul slaying is deadly, particularly before late game, just march in with a shield of infantry and let rip. Even gods fall fairly quickly to a group of these guys and they do very heavy damage to small, elite armies(eg jotuns, expensive sacreds, super heavy troops, elephants ect).
Just the general astral spells and maybe swarm/panic if im in need for that sort of thing.

[Novi]

Off the Bandar Log topic(); I'd only like to say thanks to all the brainstorming regarding the title of the thread.

I see those Thunder Strikes are pretty effective albeit extremely exhausting, (Any way to counter that apart from an E bless which I don't have?) and I've just summoned my very first angels! They seem quite impressive and will probably make fine thugs... Won't they? Or are there other, more efficient ways of employing them?

[Teraswaerto]

Angels of Wrath and Seraphim are more SC than thug material IMO, but I don't really have experience using either.

[Ironhawk]

Thunderstrikes are not exhausting if you power them via a communion. Take your 3A arch-theurgs and give them just two communion slaves. This boosts them to 4A which cuts the fatigue for the spell to 25. Then, since you are communed, each member gets only 1/3rd of the fatigue so we are talking 8.333 fatigue per casting. Not exhausting at all. But I would like to re-iterate that in anything but the smallest maps, your Theurgs are really what should be your default combat mage.

Harbingers make excellent thugs. If you have a decent bless you can have them bless themselves before buffing Mistform/Mirror Image. An easy equipment loadout (for base Pythium paths) for them is a standard set of "living" sc gear: Sword of Swiftness, Lucky Coin, Starshine Skullcap, Chainmail of Displacement, Boots of Quickness, AMA, RoR. Angels of Wrath are awesome anti-personel thugs, but unlike the Harbingers they cannot cloud trapezee which makes them a touch harder to deploy.

Edit:
HMmmm... actually my loadout above was based on the assumption of a decent Earth blessing (which I had in my last game as pythium). You'll need to adjust for Reinvigoration.