A different take on EA Pangaea – CBM 1.6

[WraithLord]

AoG is Pawned by Air Evoc.

Stellar ain't that bad but all the astral arsenal is very bad news for this build.

[thejeff]

What build can change that? An Astral pretender can only be in one place at a time. There aren't cheap Astral mage summons you can bootstrap into. Death gets you into spectres, which is probably your best bet. With only 1 S mage you're not going to have gems to abuse anyway.

One astral mage, even a powerful one, doesn't solve the problem. This build leverages strengths, and not the obvious ones, instead of trying to cover that weakness.

I'm not sure AoG really changes the lightning situation much, except possibly with Wrathful Skies or Shimmering fields. And those are army killers even without a lightning vulnerability. Thugs on their own don't need AoG, Iron Will will suffice.

[Sombre]

A pretender who can summon spectres is definitely a boon facing mind hunting.

[WraithLord]

Don't get me wrong. I think the build is sound. Strong, if you will. However said uncovered weaknesses can be the doom of it. This build would be at a disadvantage facing a nation with similar resources/size that has inherent access to astral, death and fire/air.

With an astral pretender you get astral income and can then empower stealthy commanders with S to cover from MH (1/2 are enough to deter).
With death you get specters.
With both you get Ether clan leaders.

And, I'm not saying I have the answers for this build. I'm just challenging Baalz to come up with a brilliant solution

[Baalz]

Mindhunt I think is generally speaking not going to be a huge problem. Sure, it's not gonna be the funnest thing in the world if you go up against a nation really optimizing mind hunt spam (regardless of the nation you're playing), but if you're expecting it you can do things to compensate to a fair degree. Just one or two specters (which your pretender can fairly easily summon along with llamia queens) boosted up to S3 can teleport and are stealthy so your opponent never knows where they are or even how many you have - only that the really tempting targets tend to feeblemind his guys more often than never. Add to that swarms and swarms of black harpy decoys that he never knows how many are where - or better yet Centaur Heirophants with 15 base MR who you can stick lead shields & armor of souls on, plus MR amulets if you've lined up lizards or sages or whatever. It starts looking a lot harder to just snipe the guys you want even if they do have low MR. How many mind hunts can you really expect to drop turn after turn with no clams? I think they'll often run out of pearls before you run out of harpies even if you don't have any astral cover, and those feebleminds really start to hurt with any S cover at all. In addition, if you're going up against somebody likely to blast you with mind hunts - there's no reason at all that you can't leave most of your combat Pans untransformed, or use the ones that happened to transform into something with a decent MR (there are some). You can use domes to protect the research centers if mind hunts start poaching there and you haven't lined up any S inies at all - mind hunts aren't the type of thing that suddenly drop 20 at a time so you'll have time to respond before too much damage is done. All in all, I think that threat goes into the "pain to deal with" category rather than "OMG, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?"

As to battlefield stuff, I think you're underestimating how resilient some of these suggestions are. Wrathful Skies? Super harpies & iron bane will kill them before it bites. They add storm? Hasted centaurs go across the battlefield almost as fast, and eventually you've got fairy queens or Gaia's blessing which means their regen lets them mostly ignore the damage. Master Enslave? Oh, sorry, I'm leading a bunch of mindless dark vines and this year's fashion is all about armor of souls to boost my blood magic and lead shields as accessories. Better luck next year... The white centaurs do *only* have a 14 MR, I guess they'd be the weak spot - unless you're counting the cave drakes thrown in mostly to sucker your enemy into going with MR counter stuff.

What astral specifically are you thinking is going to pose a problem?

[Belac]

It's also worth pointing out that Baalz says practically nothing about pretender design here. You want N and D is all I get from his guide. So put some S on there too and you're no worse off than any other nation with no access to Astral. That eliminates most SC pretenders, but is still doable.

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by WraithLord

So, how does this build deal with astral nations?- Mind hunt for example?- Stellar cascades spam?

On the battlefield fire and light. damage seem like Achilles heal of the build. Fire storm?- Wrath. skies?

Oh, sorry missed this.

Firestorm isn't gonna do squat to most of what you're fielding so long as you're dropping marble warriors instead of mass protection. You've got a bunch of high hitpoint, 20+ protection, potentially regenerating guys, firestorm just doesn't do enough damage. Plus, as I mentioned above you're guys can move *fast* and hit *hard* so your opponent better not be planning on firestorm to carry the day by itself.

Stellar cascades - you do have a harpy strat and a bunch of maenads, get swarm very early and howl a bit later, plus hopefully have lifelong protections. Stellar cascade isn't too scary when it can't be concentrated and your opponent closes appallingly fast.

[Baalz]

Oh, yeah I totally forgot to emphasize how ridiculous Gaia's Blessing + Mass Regen fold together by the time you're really worrying about heavy lifting battlefield magic out of your opponent. With decent protection 50% resistance is often about as good as being immune to anything not armor negating...and you're regenerating the damage that is done! If wrathful skies is likely go with mass protection. If firestorm is, go with army of lead. If you're worried about both - you can switch in marble warriors. If your opponent is such a broadly diversified magic threat that that is also a bad idea - you can probably smash straight through him with just brute strength - iron bane and rush of strength of strength harpies, or hasted minotaurs, or weapons of sharpened regenerating centaurs. You've got a whole lot of flexibility.

[Euarchus]

I was trying to get the lycanthropes amulet + flesh axe (whatever it's called) on Minotaur Lords working, but they just got ripped apart very quickly because of the tiny defence - am I doing something wrong? I only had 4-5 in each battle, but they were fighting odds I would expect most thugs to beat. This was against the AI too.

[Baalz]

The minotaurs lords are not general line troops, nor really thugs. They are intended to be special purpose units to take out the real elite enemy units which will chew through your other troops, not to take on waves of heavy infantry. When you've got outfitted Neifel jarls freezing your centaurs, or Lanka mistformed thugs, or...basically most anything tough enough to shrug off the rest of your lineup is when you bring these closers in. The idea is that they've got enough protection/hps/regen to make it really hard to stop them before they get a couple hits in - which is all it takes to accomplish their purpose. If you put them in a situation where you expect them to kill dozens of guys apiece you're gonna be disappointed, but if you expect them to take out the guy that none of your other units can you'll find they shine. You can field 4 or 5 of these guys for the cost of a real kitted SC so that's roughly what enemy SCs should be looking at facing.